


All the Stars in the Sky

by msred



Series: Starting Over [31]
Category: Chris Evans (actor) - Fandom, Real Person Fiction
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, F/M, Family, Family Fluff, Marriage, Married Life, POV First Person, Teaching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-06-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:20:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 65,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23931442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/msred/pseuds/msred
Summary: "You don't always need a plan. Sometimes you just need to breathe, trust, let go, and see what happens." ~ Mandy HaleFor 60 months, I'd been a widow. That had never been part of the plan.For 54 months, Chris Evans had been a real person to me, a colleague, even, not just a beautiful face on a movie screen. That wasn't in the plan, either.For 52 months, one of the most famous men on the planet had also just so happened to be one of my best friends. Not planned.For 48 months, I'd been in an actual, honest-to-god, capital-R Relationship with that same very talented, very famous man. I couldn't have planned that if I'd tried.And for 31 months, two and a half beautiful, happy, love-filled years, I had been Mrs. Chris Evans. Definitely, completely, wonderfully not even close to any plan I could have ever conceived of.So. Plans? They're overrated, if you ask me, especially when you've got someone who will stand next to you, hold your hand, and take on whatever comes next.
Relationships: Chris Evans (Actor) & Original Female Character(s), Chris Evans (Actor) & Reader, Chris Evans (Actor) & You, Chris Evans (Actor)/Original Female Character(s), Chris Evans (Actor)/Reader, Chris Evans (Actor)/You
Series: Starting Over [31]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1423663
Comments: 174
Kudos: 102





	1. This Day Calls for Whiskey in a Teacup

_ 48 months together, 31 months married (January, Year 6) _

I’d left both the bathroom and bedroom doors open when I sank into the bath, and I heard Chris come in, his footsteps echoing on the hardwood and carrying up the stairs. I knew he’d find me eventually, so I didn’t say anything, just tracking the sound of his footsteps through the first floor of the house - from the foyer into the living room, not stopping before they continued through the dining room, and finally into the kitchen, where he no doubt sampled the potato soup simmering on the stove and stole a tomato or a cucumber from the salad bowl on the island. Sure enough, after a few seconds of quiet, the footsteps picked up again, headed for the stairs then up into the bedroom. Finally, he stood at the doorway connecting the en suite bathroom to the master bedroom, arms crossed over his chest, one foot crossed over the other at the ankle, leaning on the door jamb. “Hey you,” he grinned at first, then looked around the room, his eyes finally landing again on my face, and his brow furrowed. “Rough day?”

I scoffed and pushed a mountain of bubbles away from my shoulders before turning my hand around to scoop them back toward me. “What do you think?”

“Well,” he pushed off the door frame to walk toward where I reclined in the oversized tub, perching himself on the edge of the ivory porcelain, “I think you’re taking a bubble bath on a weeknight,” he traced a finger through the film of bubbles on my shoulder, “which is unusual, but I also think you’re drinking tea instead of wine, so it can’t be that bad.” I scoffed again and reached across my body for the mug that sat on the corner of the tub, just next to my shoulder. I held it up to him and just looked back at him when he looked down at me almost quizzically. Finally he took the cup from me and lifted it to his lips to take a sip. “Oh.” His eyes widened. “That’s … not just tea.”

I closed my eyes and dropped my head to the cool tile behind me. “Reese Witherspoon.”

“Reese Witherspoon pissed you off?” I could practically hear him trying to remember when I’d even met the actress. (I hadn’t.) I didn’t move or open my eyes.

“Reese Witherspoon,” I repeated, “ _ Whiskey in a Teacup. _ ”

“Oh.” I don’t know that he actually knew of the book, it's not like he was the target audience, but he at least understood that I was making an allusion. I felt his fingers in my hair, pushing the damp strands that had fallen from my loose ponytail back away from my face, and I leaned into his hand. His voice was soft and warm. “How can I help?”

“Join me?”

He leaned down and kissed my forehead. “I’d love to.”

When I finally opened my eyes, he was on the other side of the room, dropping his sweater into the hamper in the linen closet. I watched him finish undressing, thinking, not for the first or the last time, about how blessed I was to get to have those moments with him, about how much I loved and cherished the fact that this man, this incredible man, came home to me every night and that we shared the most intimate, meaningful parts of ourselves with one another. I knew what everyone else saw when they looked at him, and I saw that too, I always had. I also knew that much of the world had, technically, seen exactly what I was seeing at that moment - my husband in nothing but a pair of boxer briefs (they’d seen more, actually, depending on which films they'd watched). And I enjoyed the view just as much as anyone else. But there was so much more than that, so much about his incredible heart, and the way I felt when he held me, or when he touched me at all, the way he buried his nose in my hair at night as we fell asleep and the way he got up when I did almost every morning, even if he didn’t have to work or if he’d gotten in late the night before, to make coffee so that it was ready for me by the time I finished putting my contacts in and pulling a brush through my hair. There was the way I was happy to make a complete fool of myself running lines with him when he was in the middle of a project so that he would feel more prepared to shoot his scenes the next day and the way I’d learned to trace just the right patterns over his shoulder or the backs of his hands when he started to get anxious at an event so that he would stay grounded and could breathe through it a little more easily. There was just an intimacy there, a closeness, that I didn’t have with anyone else, that I maybe never had - at least, not in exactly the same way.

He stripped off his underwear quickly, not making a show of it the way he sometimes did, and I sat up straight and scooted forward in the tub as he dropped them into the hamper with the rest of his clothes. He lowered himself in behind me, long legs running almost the full length of the tub on either side of mine. When he was settled behind me, reclining against the angled back end of the tub, he rested his hands on my hips, pressing his fingers against my waist in a signal for me to lean back with him. I let myself slide a little farther down into the water and leaned back until my head fell to his shoulder, my own shoulders against his chest and my back pressed the length of his ribs and stomach. I pushed my feet against the porcelain at the other end of the tub to keep from sinking down into the water completely, and Chris started to run his hands lightly up and down my arms, bringing his fingertips a little higher onto my shoulders each time until eventually he was rubbing his thumbs into the base of my neck. I hummed, pushing a long breath out through my nose, and relaxed just a little against him as his hands continued to work at my neck and shoulders. He tilted his head down and nudged mine to the side, and when he had it where he wanted it, he pressed a kiss just below my ear then wrapped his lips around my earlobe. He released it slowly, dragging his lips and teeth over the skin, and when he’d let me go completely he rested one wrist on my shoulder to point toward the other end of the tub with one finger and requested, quietly, “Hand me that loofah?” 

I hooked my hands around his thighs under the water and squeezed a little. I didn’t want to move from the comfort of his body, but he slid his hands from my shoulders down my back, forcing me to sit forward. When I reached for where the requested loofah floated among the bubbles, he let his hands drift even farther until he could press the heels of them into the small of my back. The pressure was glorious and made me moan a little. I heard him chuckle behind me. When I sat back against him he took the loofah in one hand and wrapped the other arm around my waist to hold me tight. He didn’t move at first, just held me there like that, his chest rising and falling slowly against my back until my breathing matched his. Then he let go, slowly, and reached for the body wash on the shelf above his head. I didn’t bother telling him that I’d actually showered before running the bath so that I wouldn’t be sitting in dirty water. Even though I didn’t need to be washed, I wouldn’t say no to him running the eucalyptus and spearmint gel over my body with the mesh sponge in his hand. 

He started with my right hand, lifting it out of the water with his own and reaching across me with the other one to run the loofah all the way from my fingertips to my shoulder, then across my collarbone and down the other arm. He dipped his hand under the water to run it up my stomach and between my breasts, all the way to my neck then around to the back of it, pulling my hair to the side with his free hand as he did. I sat up yet again to give him access to my back. Finally, as he was using his hands to scoop water up to my shoulders, letting it cascade down to rinse away the soapy residue, he asked me. “You wanna talk about it?”

I sighed - huffed, really. I  _ did  _ want to talk about it. Or I needed to, at least, if for no other reason than to vent and process. But I also didn’t want to unintentionally take my frustration out on him, so I went slowly. “You remember Mac,” I finally asked him, “twelfth grade, AP?”

I’d taken a year off from teaching when Chris and I got married. And honestly, I’d planned to take longer than that; he'd thrown it out as an option, and I liked the idea of having a schedule that was open enough that I could accompany him to L.A. for a few days at a time when he had to be there for work or during awards season, or even go with him on location now and then. I’d taken up a couple volunteer positions when I first got to Massachusetts, one at a women’s and children’s shelter in downtown Boston and one at a youth center closer to our neighborhood. I visited the women’s shelter a couple times a week, where I’d done everything from laundry and making beds to helping pack lunches for the kids to just sitting with the women, most of whom were getting back on their feet after leaving abusive relationships, and talking with them about whatever they wanted to talk about. At the youth center, where I quickly became a daily fixture, I’d done a lot of tutoring and homework help and even started a few different educational and creative programs based on ones I’d run when I was a teacher. I’d loved the work I’d done at both places, and I knew it was meaningful. But it just felt so, well, part-time, temporary. The youth center was essentially a really well-run, well-organized all-ages day care program, and the entire goal of the women’s shelter was to get the women and families back on their feet, and therefore out of the shelter, as quickly as possible. I didn’t want to give up the volunteer work altogether, but I missed being in a position to work with the same people every day over an extended period of time, to watch them grow and change and really see how the work I was doing was making a difference. So I still went by the shelter on a regular basis to check in with the women there and help in any way that I could, and I’d helped get an internship program up and running at the youth center so that college students could come in and take over some of the programs I'd had a hand in starting, but my first spring in New England I’d started applying to high schools in the area, eager to get back into the classroom. Luckily for me, there was an English teacher retiring at a school barely 15 minutes from our house, and I don’t know if it was thanks to my resume or my last name, or maybe a little of both, but I’d gotten the job. By the time I sat there sulking in my bathtub, I'd been back in the classroom for about a year and a half 

Chris pulled me back again, nodding. “Dominated that tournament we went to over Christmas break,” he chuckled, his chest shaking a couple times under my shoulders and his breath puffing out over my collarbones where his chin rested on my shoulder, “the q-tip.” I rolled my eyes but nodded; Chris had taken to calling him that because he was tall, thin, and had a full head of thick, fluffy white-blonde curls that always looked like they were in need of a trim, or at least some product of some kind. He’d said it to his face, even, at that same tournament he’d just referred to, and Mac had only grinned, probably just proud to get any kind of recognition, let alone a nickname, from one of the most famous men in America.

“Right. Remember me telling you about him being in foster care?”

He stopped laughing and nodded. “He’s got a really shitty placement, yeah?” 

For the most part, the kids at my school were pretty fortunate, pretty well-off. And of course,  _ well-off _ doesn’t always mean  _ good parents _ , but in general, the families were pretty solid - somewhat distant at worst, highly involved and supportive at best. Mac, though, a student in my senior AP English class, was a foster child - one of a only few in our school, most of whom were with really good parents who either didn’t have kids of their own or whose kids had already left home - who had gotten the short end of the proverbial family stick. The foster parents were able to put on a good enough show for social services, living in a house that one or the other of them had inherited when their parents had passed away, but they were actually kind of terrible people. They didn’t physically abuse Mac, as far as I knew, but they also didn’t help or support him in any way. On the contrary, they seemed to expect him to support them, both expecting him to “contribute” to the family with money he made from his part-time job and giving him what seemed to me to be an unreasonable amount of at-home responsibility for a high schooler. They weren’t doing anything illegal, and even in our relatively high-end community, people weren’t jumping to foster high school aged kids, so Mac was more or less stuck with them. For his part, he handled it as well as anyone could have asked; he stayed after school a lot for academic help he didn’t really need - one of the reasons he and I had grown close - he threw himself into as many extra-curricular activities as possible, and he spent every second he wasn’t at a school function bussing tables at a local restaurant. I would say he only used the home for a place to sleep, but even that would be overstating it, as he spent most nights, from what I understood, with his best friend Alex, another young man in my English class and on the basketball team with Mac. He went back to his official, legal ‘home’ only when he had some obligation there to fulfill (and those obligations ranged anywhere from doing to the grocery shopping to making repairs to things around the house that had gotten broken or damaged under what could only be described as questionable circumstances). 

I sighed, “Yeah. Over Christmas break they got another kid.”

I felt Chris shake his head behind me. “Another student of yours?”

“No,” my heart clenched, “he just turned six.”

Chris sighed then. “Oh,” the word was clipped. “And I’m guessing that’s not going well.”  
“Nope. Mac says he’s very sweet, and very broken-hearted, and of course they’re only making it worse.”

Chris’s hands found mine under the water and tightened around them. “Are they hurting him? Do we need to call the authorities?”

“No,” I shook my head. “I mean, I don’t think so. Mac said there’s never been any physical abuse or neglect, it’s just mental and emotional stuff. A lot of ignoring, dismissing, stuff like that.”

He kissed my cheek and his chin settled a little deeper into the muscles of my shoulder. “I’m sorry baby. That sucks.” Still holding my hands, he wrapped both of our arms around my waist and hugged me to him. “It really, really sucks. I don’t know how people like that keep getting kids.”

I could have gone on a whole rant about that topic alone, but I really didn’t want to, at least not at that moment. “I just,” I shrugged, starting to deflate, “it makes me angry. And I’d never ask Mac  _ not  _ to talk about it with me, but it hurts my heart, you know?”

He turned to kiss me again and nuzzled his nose against my cheek. “I do know. Just, just keep doing what you’re doing, and share the emotional load with me so it doesn’t take too much of a toll on you,” his thumbs drifted over my knuckles, “and we’ll hope that someone is doing for that little boy what you’re doing for Mac.” 

_ Brody _ , I thought.  _ That little boy’s name is Brody Christopher.  _ I didn’t say it out loud, though, because I knew how it could sound, a name like that, a name practically custom-made for me and my non-existent child, and I didn’t want Chris to think I was getting in too deep. Already. Even though the thought had crossed my own mind that I almost definitely was.

He kissed me one more time, on the side of my head above my ear, and I finally let myself relax fully against him. Nothing had changed, nothing had been fixed, but I felt a little better just for having shared it with him; he meant it when he told me to share my load with him, and he always, always made it a little easier to carry.

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Life isn't about perfection. There is no rule book. Life has many different chapters, and every chapter deserves celebrating." ~Reese Witherspoon, "Whiskey in a Teacup: What Growing Up in the South Taught Me About Life, Love, & Baking Biscuits"


	2. Instinct in a Woman

_ 4 weeks later (February, Year 6) _

Chris sat across from me at the dinner table, watching me push roasted vegetables around my plate with a fork. He hadn’t said much since we sat down. He was great about waiting me out when he could tell something was up and I wasn’t being forthcoming. He would usually ask me once or twice if something was wrong, and if I didn’t give it up right away, he’d just wait. It always worked, mostly because I knew his silence wasn’t borne out of annoyance or judgment or anything else like that, but that it meant he was willing to go at my pace. When his plate was empty, mine still mostly untouched, I finally started to let it out.

“Mac brought his foster brother into the school this afternoon,” I told him. I’d mentioned the boys here and there since the night I’d first told Chris about Brody being brought into the foster home, mainly because if I hadn’t mentioned them for a couple days he always asked (I think that was partly because he wanted me to know he’d listened to me and cared about things that were important to me, and partly because  _ he  _ actually cared about what was happening with the boys, the younger one especially), but there wasn’t usually much to report. That day, though, I’d actually met the six-year-old for the first time.

“Oh yeah?” He pushed his plate aside, folding his arms on the table in front of him and leaning in. 

“Yeah.” I nodded and pushed my own plate aside, next to his. “The elementary school had a half-day and Mac didn’t want him to be alone the  _ whole _ time, so he went home before basketball practice and picked him up.” And then he’d left him in the classroom with me while he was practicing, where I’d talked to him and watched him color and gotten in even more over my head.

“Alone like, the only kid at home?”

“Nope. Alone like alone.”

Chris narrowed his eyes and leaned a little more across the table toward me. “He’s six.”

“Yep.” I just nodded, leaning back in my chair and crossing my arms over my chest.

“Is that even legal?” One hand flew up off the table.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Probably not. I don’t think they care.”

He blew a long, hard breath out his nose, and I saw his jaw clench. It took him a moment to say anything. “Well,” he finally said, his voice even and forced, “it’s a good thing he’s got Mac.”

“Yeah,” I sat back up to the table, leaning on one forearm and using the other hand to trace the rim of my water glass. “I just feel bad, because it means Mac is spending a lot more time in that house than he used to, and I can tell it’s taking a toll on him.” Chris reached across the table and moved the glass out of my reach, slipping his fingers between mine and pulling my hand down to the table. His thumb traced back and forth over mine as I talked. I stared down at our hands. “His grades haven’t started slipping, yet, but his demeanor has changed. He’s grouchy and short-tempered, and even the basketball coach came by the other day to ask me if something was up because he knows Mac talks to me. And I’ve tried to talk to him about going back to spending more time at Alex’s,” I shrugged, “his parents have always welcomed Mac with open arms, but he refuses to be out of the house more than necessary. He clearly cares a lot about that little boy.” I brought up the arm I’d been leaning on, wedging my thumbnail between my teeth and tugging a little at my top lip. It was funny, I’d never been much of a nail-biter, except during really intense sporting events, but that was one of Chris’s anxious tics - nail-biting, running his fingers over his lips, pulling at them, smoking, unfortunately, basically anything that involved bringing his hands to his mouth - and somewhere along the way I’d picked it up. I didn’t love that it had happened, but it wasn’t the worst thing in the world, and it was less destructive than my own previous tic, which had been picking at the skin around my nails until my fingers were raw. Besides, since we both had the same ‘tells,’ we were each quick to pick up on them in the other. Chris reached over and pulled my hand away from my mouth, guiding it down so that he could lay it atop our other hands, all four of them stacked in the center of the table. He just winked at me when I lowered my head and looked up at him to mouth  _ thanks _ . 

“Oh!” I exclaimed after a second of sitting that way with him, anxious to get to the point I really wanted to make, and Chris jumped a little. I think it was at least partially an act, a silly little thing he did for my benefit, and I appreciated it. But then, my own little display was much the same thing, a staged ‘impromptu’ moment I’d actually carefully set up. “Would you like to know his name?” He nodded. “It’s Brody,” I paused, and he lifted one corner of his mouth, just a tiny bit, “Christopher.”

“Seriously?” Chris’s eyebrows shot up toward his hairline, and when I just nodded he shook his head and let out a little laugh through his nose. “Are you sure  _ you _ didn’t name him?” I pulled my right hand from the bottom of our little pile and smacked his arm with it. He only laughed at my petulance. “Seriously, you know if we had a son you’d  _ love  _ to name him Brody, and, well, you’d probably be more adamant about putting ‘Christopher’ in there than I would.”

I scoffed, pretending to be offended. “It’s tradition.  _ Your _ middle name is  _ your _ dad’s name. And Christopher is just a good name. Besides,” I worked my hands back into his, unstacking them so we were holding hands across the table, “I can’t imagine two better men to name my hypothetical son after.” He lifted one eyebrow and pursed his lips as if to say,  _ I know you’re sucking up. _ I went on, my tone a little more subdued as I did. “Anyway, um, Mac is worried about him. He said he’s starting to change. He was such a sweet little boy, apparently, when he first came to them, and Mac says he’s not becoming mean, or a troublemaker, but he’s closing himself off, losing his spark.”

“Sounds like what you’re seeing with Mac.”

I sighed. “Yeah, basically. Apparently the foster parents pulled Brody out of the art program his therapist recommended, and they’ve started missing therapy appointments altogether. And I guess one of the only things he brought with him when he came to them was a baby doll that never left his side, and they’ve taken that too.” I rolled my eyes. “Because he’s a boy.”

Chris’s chin dropped to his chest. “Fuck.”

I didn’t say anything for a minute. I didn’t want to rush him. Finally, I pulled his hands across the table a little and he looked back up at me. “Chris?”

“Yeah, baby?”

“Do you remember that Christmas,”I fidgeted in my seat and Chris slid his hands a little up my arms, his fingers playing over the soft, extremely sensitive skin on the insides of my forearms, just below the crooks of my elbows, “when we were at your mom’s and I told you I couldn’t have kids myself?”

He wrapped his hands around my arms and rocked them side to side. “You mean when you were fuckin’  _ terrified _ I was going to break up with you because of it and I was already planning on asking you to marry me?” He tugged on my arms, smirking and pulling a little harder when I bumped into the edge of the table. I groaned a little and rolled my eyes, but I pushed myself up out of my chair to lean across the table to him. He couldn’t even be bothered to meet me halfway, sitting in his chair, just barely leaning forward, and smirking at me until I was close enough for him to push his chin forward and kiss me. “Yeah,” he murmured and smiled against my lips, and I took that as my cue to sit back into my seat, “I seem to recall something about it. Why?”

I cleared my throat and pulled my arms back until I could hook my hands into his again. “You said we didn’t have to talk about it right then, but maybe down the road we could talk about a surrogate, or adoption, or even fostering. If that’s what I wanted.”

“Right.” He nodded.

“I think,” I looked down at our hands then lifted my head to look him straight in the eyes, “I think this is what I want.”

“This,” he furrowed his brow and just looked at me for a second. “Oh.” He blinked and I watched the understanding wash over him. “You want to foster Brody?”

“I do.” I sat up straight and pulled my hands from his, smoothing them over my lap nervously. “And hear me out, okay!” One hand flew up, palm out toward him, “I know this can’t be a, a spur of the moment decision, something done on a whim. So,” I folded my hands on the table in front of me, “this is me starting a discussion, not me asking you to make a decision right now. And I also know you probably had a baby in mind when you said that. And I get it. You, you deserve to get to be a daddy to a baby, to raise him or her from the very beginning -”

“Stop.”

“- and to get to have all those milestones and I get -”

“Babe, stop!” He reached across the wood between us and grabbed my hands, which I only realized were twitching and wringing when he closed his around them. “It’s okay. I think, I think fostering Brody would be a really good thing.” I dropped my eyes and he lowered his head until he was within my line of sight, looking up at me.

“Please don’t just humor me. We need to have a discussion about this.”

He shook his head. “I’m not humoring you. I mean, yeah,” he lifted our hands off the table to gesture into the air, “babies are great. But hey, they scream, and cry, and poop.” With each word he lifted our hands then dropped them back onto the wood.

“Chris,” I groaned and rolled my eyes. “Please don’t joke about this. Agreeing to foster a school-aged child is, it’s big. And I want to do this, I really do, because I think he needs it, and I think we’d be good for him. But I don’t want to do it if you’re not completely, 100% on-board. Because this has to be something that we’re both all-in on. And I have to be totally honest with you,” I squeezed his hands then twisted mine to link our fingers together, “if we do this, I don’t know when, or if, I’ll be ready for a baby on top of having Brody. ”

“Hey, listen to me,” Chris kept his left hand closed around my right one, but he pulled his right hand free. He sat back in his seat then reached down to grab the front of his chair between his legs. He lifted the front two legs off the floor and dragged the chair around the corner of the table until he was less than a foot in front of me. Then, he grabbed the seat of my chair and pulled me forward until there was just enough room between them for our legs. “It really is okay.” He dragged our still-linked hands across the table and into his lap and rested his other hand on the outside of my leg, halfway up my thigh. “I don’t  _ have  _ to have a baby. I don’t  _ have  _ to have kids at all, I’ve told you that, many times. But I do think we’d be really good parents - I already know you’re a great mom to dozens of kids just because that’s who you are, and I know we’re a great team.”

I wrapped my hand around his bicep - as much as I could, anyway, which wasn’t all that far. “But you know a six-year-old is going to come with some emotional baggage, right? I mean, I’ve met him once, for like an hour. And you haven’t met him at all. Don’t you want to at least meet him first?" As I had a habit of doing, I started to rush through my words, letting them spill out. “We don’t really have any idea what we’re getting into. Just because Mac speaks highly of him doesn’t necessarily mean we’re not getting in over our heads here.”

Chris chuckled. “Are you trying to talk me into it, or talk yourself out of it?”

I huffed. “Neither. I just,” I rolled my eyes and shook my head, trying to find the right words. “I know how far you’re willing to go sometimes to make me happy.”

“And that’s a bad thing?” Apparently I’d failed at that whole  _ finding the right words _ thing.

“God, no.” My hand flew from his arm to cup his jaw, my thumb tracing his cheekbone. “Of course not.” I leaned in for a kiss, for good measure. “But I don’t want this to be that. If and when we do this, any version of this, I want it to be because we both want it. I don’t want six months to go by and for Brody to be ‘that little boy your wife brought home.’ Not that I would think you would be anything less than amazing with him, and for him, no matter what,” he pressed his forehead to mine and closed his fingers tighter around my leg; he knew I was overthinking, afraid of offending him or having the words come out wrong, “but I don’t want you to feel like you got saddled with a child that wasn’t who or what you dreamed of when you dreamed of becoming a dad, just because you wanted to make me happy.”

He lifted his hands to rest on my shoulders and I let both of mine sit on his chest. “Look, no one chooses their children, right? My sister didn’t  _ design _ my niece or my nephews,” his hands turned, only the outside edges of his palms touching me for a second before he dropped them again to curl over my shoulders, “they are who they are and she’s their mom, because that’s the way it was meant to be. I love the idea of being a dad, but I love the reality of you more.” His thumbs slid up the sides of my neck and he looked at me until, I assumed, he felt like it had sunk in. “You weren’t meant to have babies, but you’ve been a mom for a long, long time. Brody, for reasons I’m sure we’ll come to understand more about over time, needs parents. Good ones. I don’t want to get too philosophical here, but things probably happened the way they have for a reason. And maybe that reason is that we were meant to bring Brody here, with us.”

“There’s one more thing you should know before you agree to anything.” He just looked at me, one eyebrow raised, and waited for me to go on. “Brody’s not white. He’s Latino, at least partially, anyway. I don’t know the specifics.”

“And?”

“And, I just thought you should know.”

“Is that  _ why  _ you want to foster him?” He tilted his head to the side and kept that one eyebrow lifted. "Because you think he’ll be better off in our  _ white _ family?"

If the question had come from anyone else I would have been livid at the insinuation. I knew he wasn’t accusing me of anything, though. That wasn’t his style. “No, of course not,” I assured him I wasn’t trying to play some sort of ‘white savior’ role in the situation. Of  _ course _ I would have preferred, assuming that abuse or neglect wasn't the reason that he had been put into foster care in the first place, that Brody was still with his birth parents, or at least that he could be with another family that shared his culture. As much as I believed that Chris and I would be wonderful parents - together, at least, I was less convinced of my own abilities individually, but he made me better at all things and in all ways - and that we would absolutely provide a better home than the one Brody was in at the moment, I also 

knew we would have to work hard to make sure he didn’t miss out on parts of his heritage by being with us. But the reality was, he  _ had  _ been put into foster care, and placing him with another Latin-American family  _ wasn't _ an option, at least not without pulling him out of his school and moving him, which would just be too much for him at the moment, because there were no Latin-American foster families in our area. If I’d thought Chris actually thought that was what was going on, I could have told him that the idea to bring Brody to live with us had been growing since the first seed had been planted, when Mac first mentioned Brody to me nearly a month earlier and I had no idea about his race or ethnicity. But I didn’t think I needed to say that, because I didn’t think Chris actually thought that was what was going on; I thought it was a rhetorical question to make a point. “I want to foster him because he is a child in a bad situation who deserves something better and I think we can provide that, at least until an even better situation for him arises.  _ If  _ one arises. I just thought you should know.”

“Because of the media attention it might bring?” I shrugged. “This doesn’t change anything.” He shook his head a little, at himself, I thought. “I mean, it  _ does _ , of course. We’ll have a lot to learn in order to make sure we’re raising him in a way that doesn’t deprive him of the things he’d learn and the experiences he would have if he were being raised by his own birth parents, but I don’t mind learning.” 

My stomach flipped and my heart raced. I tried not to sound as hopeful as I felt, because I didn’t want him to feel bad if he needed to walk back what he’d said. “So you, you’re on board?”

“Baby, if you’re the captain of this ship, I’m your first mate.”

“Oh my god,” I pushed against his chest then smacked it once I’d put some distance between us, “you’re such a cornball.”

He wiggled his eyebrows at me. “Gotta start brushing up on my dad jokes.” I groaned and he laughed, going on. “I do have one more question though.”

I nodded maybe too eagerly. “Yeah, of course, anything.”

“Before I go call my lawyer, do we need to try to get Mac here too?”

“No.” I shook my head. “I thought about that, but I kind of … felt him out this afternoon. I didn’t say anything directly but I was fishing a little. I think he really just wants to be able to go back to spending all his time at Alex’s when he’s not at school or basketball practice.” Chris nodded like he understood. “He’s going to be 18 in about a month anyway, so I don’t even know if the state or child services or whoever it is that handles that stuff would change his placement at this point. I actually think that's one of the reasons he's so concerned about Brody right now, I don't know if Mac will even continue living there after his birthday. And oh god,” I squeezed my eyes closed and bit the inside of my cheek, “I just realized how little I know about how this whole thing works.” I blew a breath out through my nose and dropped my chin to my chest.

“Hey, it’s okay.” He lifted my head with a finger under my chin, “That lawyer I just mentioned? He’ll walk us through all the legal stuff,” he waved a hand through the air, a gesture that implied that what he was saying carried far less weight than it did, “make sure we know what we need to know and handle what we don’t. And my mom will be more than happy to hold our hands through the at-home stuff, the practical stuff the social workers won’t necessarily go over, and the emotional stuff.”

I really hadn’t been prepared for our conversation the way I thought I had been. Well, okay, that wasn’t exactly true. I’d been  _ over  _ prepared. It wasn’t that I had been scared of how Chris would react; I’d stopped worrying about that, regardless of the situation, pretty early in our relationship. He just wasn’t a judgmental person. In fact, he seemed to sincerely enjoy learning about and discussing things and perspectives that were outside his experience. So, even when he didn’t like the things I told him, or when I asked him to do things he didn’t want to do, his responses were only kind, and thoughtful, and sincere. But I wasn’t prepared for him to agree so quickly to what I was asking of him that day. I knew it was a lot. And even I was a little surprised by how much it meant to me, how much I wanted it. I had actually been completely okay with never being a parent. I’d learned fairly early on, early in my 20s, that pregnancy would be dangerous for me, and my first husband and I were already on the fence, at best, about whether or not we wanted to have kids. So when we found out that I couldn’t, or at the very least shouldn’t, we quickly went to the side of considering ourselves childless by choice. Then after he passed, it just didn’t really seem like an issue anymore. I was midway through my 30s, I had all the kids I’d ‘adopted’ through school, and, honestly, I didn’t expect to find another partner any time soon, if at all. The ‘mom question’ just seemed like something I didn’t need to think about anymore. But then there was Chris, and there was the life we created together, and while he never, ever pushed about kids, always true to what he’d told me that morning in his mom’s guest room, I knew it was something he’d always wanted. And, since being with him, it was something I wanted too, something I wanted _ with him _ . I wanted to see him be a dad, and I wanted to be a mom, as long as it was as his partner. 

So when Brody had come along, it really had been exactly how Chris had described it - it was as if he was meant to be ours, as if he was supposed to be our little boy and to make us parents. But I couldn’t help but wonder, worry, actually, if I was being impulsive, or selfish, if maybe I just picked the first kid who had come along in need of a better situation and decided to use him for my own wish-fulfillment. I knew that if that was the case and I couldn’t see it for myself, Chris would let me know. He would be gentle and loving and empathetic, but he would tell me if he thought that what I was suggesting wasn’t the right thing, or was for the wrong reasons (because taking a child out of a bad situation could never be the  _ wrong  _ thing, surely, but the motivation needed to be right too, I thought). So I was prepared for him to point that out to me, or at least for him to tell me that he needed more time for us to sort out what I was asking to get us into. His immediate agreement had kind of thrown me and my head was spinning due to how much I’d just realized I didn’t know.

I took a deep breath and blew it out past my lips. “Right.” I nodded. “Okay.”

He dropped his hands to my hips and squeezed, his thumbs pressing into the ticklish spots in the creases where my thighs met my hips, making me jump. “And like I said, we make a pretty damn good team, so all the rest, we’ll figure it out together.”

“You are so good at this.” Sometimes I felt like a character from a sappy romance movie with him, because I couldn’t help the way my eyes softened and my head tilted to one side, like a lovestruck teen.

He laughed and tickled me again. “We’ve never done  _ this  _ before, baby.”

“No,” I rolled my eyes but I couldn’t bring myself to be more sarcastic than that. “This. Me. My overthinking and my hyper-emotionality and my drama.”

“Woman.” He rolled his own eyes, much more emphatically than I just had, and leaned toward me to speak lowly, almost conspiratorially. “Were we at the same house for Sunday dinner the other day? I was  _ raised  _ on drama. Literally. But you, you are the easiest, most natural thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "There is an instinct in a woman to love most her own child; and an instinct to make any child who needs her love, her own." ~ Robert Brault


	3. The First Step

_ 1 week later (mid February, Year 6) _

I sat on the couch next to Chris, my knee bouncing almost violently between us. His hand had rested on it for a while, no doubt in an attempt to get me to relax, but it wasn’t having the desired effect. True to his word, Chris had called his lawyer the morning after our conversation about Brody the previous week. The first thing the attorney had told Chris was that he wasn’t the right person for him to be talking to. Mr. Matthews dealt with contract issues; that’s why Chris employed him. The man looked over all of Chris’s contracts, from movies to commercials to conventions, before Chris signed anything. He also advised him some on  _ A Starting Point _ . But family law and the foster care system were out of his range of expertise. He had recommended someone though, a woman out of Boston who he had somewhat amusingly called a ‘shark in sheep’s clothing.' Apparently she was kind and empathetic and highly respected by nearly everyone in her field, but she was also tough-as-nails and had a very solid track record of getting her clients what they were looking for, or at least some version of it. Chris’s regular lawyer, though, had also told him that she was picky about her clients, limiting herself not necessarily to cases she believed she would win, but to those she  _ wanted  _ to win, those in which she thought she was actually doing what was best for the children and families involved. He’d promised to call her though, on our behalf, in case that might make her more likely to take us on.

The lawyer, Ms. Donovan, sat opposite Chris and me in the chair we’d pulled from the corner of the room to face the couch. She only smiled softly at what I assumed she could tell was my nervous state. “Mr. and Mrs. Evans, thank you so much for inviting me into your home.” She bent to rest her briefcase on the floor beside the chair and folded her hands in her lap.

Chris nodded and moved his hand from my leg to wrap around my waist. “Thank you for agreeing to come out here to meet with us. It’s just, as I’m sure Mr. Matthews told you, my wife is a high school teacher, and by the time she got away from school, and we got into the city, well, we’d have been pushing it on your office hours.”

She waved him off. “It’s no problem at all, really. It was nice to have an excuse to get out of the city for an afternoon,” she turned her smile a little more fully on me, “and this is such a personal issue, anything that makes you guys more comfortable is a plus. So, with that being said,” suddenly she sat up straighter, almost snapping to attention, “it  _ is  _ nice to be out of the office, and your home is lovely, but we have work to do, so let’s go ahead and get down to business, shall we?”

“Yeah, absolutely.” Chris’s free hand, the one that wasn’t drawing circles over my hip through my sweater, flew off his lap then landed again with a  _ slap _ . “What’ve you got?”

“Well, to start with, I got as much information as I could without formally filing a petition.” She pulled a leather portfolio from the briefcase at her feet and opened it, thumbing through the files as she spoke. “The foster family has never had any formal complaints against them, but that of course doesn’t mean they are model parents. Unfortunately, I can’t see any of their actual files until we file for a change of placement. Once we do that I can request to look at all their home visit reports. And that’s only even necessary if they challenge our request, but we’ll get to that soon enough." Her expression shifted, just slightly, a cloud falling over her face. "Um, so, Mr. and Mrs. Evans, how much do you know about the young man you’re hoping to foster?” She had tucked her index finger into the stack of papers and when she finished speaking she shuffled them so that the one she had been holding was on top. I could see a small black and whilte photo of Brody printed in the top right corner.

“I -” Chris started, but the picture snapped me out of my daze and I cut him off.

“I’ve met him.” Chris stopped a little abruptly, but when he looked over, the corners of his mouth were just barely turned up and he nodded slowly, almost imperceptibly, probably, to anyone who wasn’t as close as I was, or who didn’t know him as well. “Once. One of my students is being fostered with him.”

“Oh, are you,” Ms. Donovan trailed off and started flipping through her papers again. “were you wanting to take legal guardianship of that child as well?”

I shook my head quickly. “No. I mean,” I shrugged, “not that we wouldn’t, but he’s almost 18. And he’s got a good friend whose family had already pretty much taken him in before Brody came along. He doesn’t,” I paused, looking for the right words, “ _ need _ us, like Brody does. He’s older, he can mostly take care of himself.”

She nodded, big sweeping nods. “Ah, okay. That makes a lot of sense, actually.” She seemed to be making a mental note of something that we didn’t yet understand as she turned to one form in particular, skimmed it, then laid them all flat again with the one bearing Brody’s picture on the top. I looked over at Chris as she did that and he just pressed his thumb a little more firmly against my waist.  _ Just wait it out. She knows what she’s doing _ . “Well, back to Brody, you’ve met him?”

“I have.”

“And Mr. Evans?”

Chris turned his attention back to her and shook his head. “Uh, no. I just know what my wife has told me.”

“Right. Well, there’s no way to say this that doesn’t make me sound like a horrible person,” I was pretty sure at that point that I knew where she was going, “and I’m sorry for that, but if you’ve met him you know that he’s … um …” she trailed off, so I jumped in to help her out.

“Not white?”

“Right. I’m so sorry,” her professional veneer dropped a little and the compassion was clear on her face, “like I said, I know it’s terrible to just, point that out first thing. And it doesn’t, it  _ shouldn’t  _ matter, but you’re,” she looked down into her lap, her short, well-manicured nails tapping a little on the folder she held open, “so well-known, and sometimes public scrutiny matters to people. And considering what you’re well-known  _ for _ -” her head came back up and her eyes sought out Chris’s, asking him not to make her spell out the rest. Ever the hero she had just alluded to, he jumped in to help her out.

“Am I going to care about what people have to say about Captain America taking in a brown child to raise?” There was a hint of sarcasm in his voice, and a smaller one of annoyance. I knew that neither were truly aimed at the attorney in front of us. I could tell that she really didn’t believe that it should matter what Brody’s race was, but also that she knew it was a conversation that had to happen, sooner rather than later, and I was pretty positive he saw it the same way. 

“Again, I’m really sorry.” I wanted to tell her to stop picking at her nails; they were too pretty for her to mess up on our account. “I just, I would feel absolutely awful if I didn’t bring it up and you  _ didn’t  _ know and then we got to the courthouse, or, worse yet, if the foster parents didn’t contest it, and social services showed up on your doorstep with this sweet little boy thinking he had a new home, a better home, and you did care about that.” I felt for her, truly, because I could tell how uncomfortable she was with the whole conversation. On the one hand, it could seem as if she were implying that Chris and I were racist, or that we wouldn’t want to help a child who didn’t look like us. But on the other hand, she had to make sure, for Brody’s sake and her own, that she wasn’t going to walk into a situation like the one she’d just described. It wasn’t an easy spot for her to be in.

“While we appreciate the thought,” Chris assured her, kind but firm, “we were already aware of that and it doesn’t change anything.”

“Okay.” She sighed and actually chuckled a little. “Well, that’s wonderful to hear. So, moving forward, I was able to get more information about him than I was the foster parents. Without saying too much, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, there  _ may _ be a case worker at social services with whom I have a professional history and who trusts my judgment, and that same case worker  _ may _ share your concerns about Brody’s placement and want to see him in a better home, one more conducive to actually nurturing a six-year-old and not just keeping him alive.” Her finger skimmed over the form in front of her as she referenced it. “So, his father, who was Costa Rican, was killed in a car accident when Brody was about …” she tapped a line of text on the form, “two.”

My breath was knocked out of me a little. “Oh.”

“Oh, did you,” she furrowed her brow and looked up at me with concern, “did you expect something … different?”

I shook my head and frowned. “No. I mean, I don’t know.” I shrugged, “I guess I hadn’t thought about him knowing, and  _ losing  _ biological parents. That makes it even more sad, somehow.” I really didn’t know what I thought had happened to land him in his current situation. I think, maybe, somewhere in the back of my mind, I just thought that his current situation had  _ always  _ been his situation, but that he’d only recently come to his current foster parents. I guess it was hard for me to imagine that he’d once had a family, a real one, whom he’d known, and who’d known him, and that he no longer did. It didn’t make sense to me, somehow.

“Ohh boy, you’re not going to like what I’m about to say next, then.” Ms. Donovan linked her fingers together and rested her hands, palms down, on the papers on her lap. She looked at us, at me in particular, like she was about to deliver bad news - somewhere between  _ I’m sorry ma’am, we’re out of your favorite coffee today _ and  _ I’m sorry ma’am, we’re going to have to suggest putting the dog down _ . Beyond that, it was impossible for me to read her face. “Uh, his mother, who is white, just so you know, I know that doesn’t really matter to you guys, but-”

“Wait, is?” Chris’s voice was clipped. I knew he didn’t care about her race, any more than I did (except maybe that knowing she was white made me feel a little less like Brody would be losing something by being with us), and that that wasn’t what he was asking about. The fact that the attorney spoke of the mother in present tense after what we’d just learned about the father had thrown him as much as it had me.

“Yes. That’s the part I’m afraid is going to really upset your wife.” She made a sympathetic face and her eyes darted over to me. “Brody’s mother is still living. That case worker I mentioned, he’s a clumsy guy. He may have dropped a few files, an address, phone number, when I was in his office the other day. Anyway, I took it upon myself to go ahead and get in touch with the birth mother before meeting with you guys. I didn’t want any surprises.” She lifted her hands, palms out to us, as if to say  _ I was just doing my job _ . And okay, that wasn’t  _ entirely  _ true, exactly, but I certainly wasn’t going to complain if she had some connections that she was willing to use. “She’s very ill. Cancer. When she got to the point that she couldn’t really take care of herself, let alone an almost-kindergartener, she turned him over to the commonwealth. That was back in the fall, and he was in a group home for a while before being placed in his current home.”

“Isn’t there family who could have taken care of him? Grandparents? Aunts and uncles? Something?” Chris’s voice was incredulous, mostly, like he couldn’t believe that someone would willingly give up their own child to the foster system, sick or otherwise.

“Okay, you have to believe me, I’m not making this up.” The attorney looked at both of us in turn, gauging, I thought, whether we were ready to hear what she was going to say, whether we were giving her the appropriate amount of attention. “The father’s family was almost all out of the picture before they ever met. The only living family member he had at the time was his mother, and she passed away of age-related illness shortly after Brody was born. As for the mother, she was a foster child herself, one of the lucky ones. She was with one family from the age of eight up, an otherwise childless couple in Ohio, and they treated her very well. But they were older, even when she was with them, and they passed away several years ago, shortly after she moved out of their home.” She smiled a small, sad smile and shifted her eyes down to the papers on her lap. Chris tugged me closer and I nearly fell over onto him. He leaned over to kiss the top of my head when it hit his shoulder. He held me there for a couple seconds then let me sit back up, and Ms. Donovan went on. “She never saw the ugly side of foster care, living with that one family in their small town, so she thought the best thing for Brody was to try to give him what she’d had. Of course, from the sound of it, that’s not what he got, but she’s already signed him over, and her health is only getting worse.”

I didn’t care that we had company. I didn’t care that we were in the middle of what was supposed to be a professional meeting. I turned to bury my face into my husband’s shoulder and squeezed my eyes shut around the tears that were gathering there. “Chris -” His name shook as it left my throat.

“Shh, baby,” he reached across me to run his hand over my hair and let his hand rest on the back of my head as he leaned down to kiss my hair. “I know.” His voice was low, quiet. He probably did know, more or less, exactly what I was thinking - that it was too much heartbreak for one family to have to go through, that it was just  _ wrong  _ that this young mother, after losing the father of her child, had gotten so ill that she made the nearly impossible decision to give up that child for what she sincerely, if naively, believed would be a better situation, and yet he’d ended up where he was, that I was even more sure that we had to help get him out of that bad home - because he knew me.

I nodded against his shoulder and forced myself back up. “Okay,” I nodded at Ms. Donovan, “I’m sorry.”

She only waved me off. “Don’t be, please. I get it. I’m a mom. A little girl,” she smiled softly and her eyes lit up, “just about Brody’s age. After all this, if the two of you weren’t trying to get him, I would probably be trying myself.” She seemed to wink, like we were in cahoots or something, and Chris’s shoulders shook just once; it wasn’t a laugh, but it was something. I managed to force a smile. “And now that brings us to the real work, getting him here with the two of you. Now,” she took a deep breath and tilted her head a little to one side, “if absolutely necessary, we can see about having the mother petition to get her rights back and then she could sign him over to you as his legal guardians. But I’d like to save that as a very last resort, due to her health and the physical and emotional toll it would take on her.”

I jumped in then. “We don’t,” I looked over at Chris and he nodded for me to keep going. “We don’t want to do that. I mean, unless we absolutely,  _ absolutely  _ have to, of course. But, any and everything else you can do first, do it.”

“Good.” The attorney scratched a quick note on a legal pad on the left side of the portfolio. “I’m glad we’re in agreement there.” She rested her hands once again on the open folder. “Okay, so then that takes us to the foster family. There are a few ways this could go down. We could file the petition and they could willingly give up their rights and you guys could step in that way. We might not even have to have you register as foster parents for the commonwealth, we could potentially just try to have you assigned as Brody’s legal guardians. Unfortunately, I doubt that’s the way it will go down.” She sat back into the chair, almost as if she was settling in, and a look of something akin to distaste seemed to take over her face. “One of the few pieces of information I could gather from public record is that Brody is only the second foster child they’ve ever had, and they’ve had the first one, your student, for the past several years. But, now that I know that the first child is aging out soon, it makes sense why they would take on another child.” Her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed and the distaste began to look more like disgust.

“It does?” I asked her. I could feel Chris tense next to me and it seemed that what she was saying wasn’t as novel an idea to him as it was to me.

She frowned. “Once your student ages out, they lose the check they receive from the commonwealth. I can’t say this for sure, of course,” she held up her hands in front her, like she was defending herself, “because I don’t know them yet, but it kind of seems like Brody is their back-up.”

“Motherfucker.” Chris didn’t raise his voice, but the venom in it was evident in the way he growled. I got the feeling that I’d been right before and that Ms. Donovan’s theory wasn’t a complete surprise to him, but also that he wasn’t any less angry about it from having had an idea it was coming.

I reached across my body with my right hand to close it over Chris’s left one on my hip. I squeezed his hand then tucked my fingers under his palm and rubbed my thumb slowly over his knuckles. I kept my eyes trained on Ms. Donovan. “You know we don’t-”

She cut me off, shaking her head and waving her hand in front of her. “No no, of course not. I would never think that of you. But sadly, there are many people who do think that way. And that makes me worry that this isn’t going to go the easy way.”

“You’ll think they’ll challenge us.” Chris sounded like he was telling her, rather than asking.

She nodded. “I do.”

“But, that’s why we have you?” Whereas Chris had taken what probably should have been a question and stated it as a fact, I did almost the opposite. I wanted to feel confident, but instead I felt like I was asking for her reassurance that she was going to help us help Brody.

“It is. So then the next step will be to fight back. Now, before I go where I’m about to go, please know that I understand it’s probably not exactly the way you want to do this, but I think it’s the best way to start.”

Chris looked over at me then back to the attorney and nodded. “Go on.”

“Well, if we do have to fight it, we’ll have to prove, in a  _ legal  _ sense, that it’s better for the welfare of the minor child to be in your care than theirs.” I must have looked like I was going to interject, because she gave me a stern look that made me feel like I was one of my own students, on the receiving end of a warning. “And just saying, ‘But your honor, they don’t pay enough attention to him,’ isn’t going to cut it. Now, we can try to prove that they are legally unfit, which I’m prepared to do, if it comes to that. But that will probably get really ugly, and as a mom myself, I don’t think that’s what’s best for Brody.” Chris nodded and shifted his hand under mine so that he could lace our fingers together. “So, what I’m suggesting we do first is,” she paused, took a deep breath, “we make it less about who they are and more about who you are.”

My eyebrows drew down and together and I tilted my head to one side. “What does that mean?”

“Well,” she gestured toward me with one hand, “you’re a teacher. That will definitely work in our favor. Education is definitely toward the top of the 'ideal parental occupations' list. Now, I know this is only your second year teaching here in Sudbury and they may not know you all that well yet, so if you can start contacting people in Virginia for character references - administrators, other teachers, even parents and students - that could go a very long way.”

Chris scoffed, a brief moment of levity in the midst of the very serious discussion. “If letters from students and parents is what it’s going to take, I think we got this.”

Ms. Donovan turned her attention to him. “Well, there’s also the matter of you.”

“Right.” He made a loose fist with the hand that wasn’t still wrapped around my waist, fingers tightening and relaxing around mine rhythmically, and bounced it on his knee. “Because I’m …”

She closed her eyes and shook her head, made a face like she was almost amused by how off-base she assumed he was about to be. “You.” She smiled at both of us when Chris’s mouth snapped shut; it was confirmation that she’d been right, that he’d assumed she was referring to his Captain America fame. “In general you have a stellar reputation for being a man of character, particularly in your industry, someone who is both respectable and respectful. So while I’m sure it won’t hurt that you’re  _ Captain America _ , that’s not what we’re relying on, necessarily. We’re relying on that ‘good guy’ reputation and, along with that, your money, your -”

“My,” he cut her off and turned to look at me with his brows furrowed, a deep crease between them, and I returned his gaze with wide eyes, “my money?” He turned back to the woman across from us, the confusion still etched on both of our faces.

“Well, not exactly. Not in the way it looks like you’re thinking. Still, this is the part I thought might make you a little … iffy. Don’t be confused, I’m not suggesting you pay anyone off. What I mean, really, is your financial stability. I don’t know what the current foster family’s financial situation is, but if I’m right about them doing this for the check, they’re probably not in a stellar position.” She leaned toward us, closing the gap between her and us slightly, resting her elbows on her thighs and folding her hands together so that the index fingers pointed out toward us. “You on the other hand, well, you’re definitely the most financially stable person in this town, and quite possibly all the others in this area as well. So not only will that prove that you can take care of a child without struggling to do so, it will go a long way to show that you’re  _ not  _ trying to get guardianship of him for the money.”

As she seemed to have expected, I got an uneasy feeling in my stomach. It was a given that Chris had more money than most, if not all, of the residents of even our generally well-off suburban town and all the surrounding ones (our neighbors all did well for themselves, but none of them were Marvel stars, so), probably stretching as far as the actual city of Boston, at least. But I didn’t want that to be some ‘card’ we played in this situation. I had grown up without much money, and while my childhood was certainly not the best, for other reasons, one thing my parents - and especially my grandparents - had taught me was that it was possible to raise a child without being rich. There were so, so many things more important than that. (That was  _ also _ evidenced by my less-than-stellar childhood, one filled with heartbreak and struggle that had absolutely nothing to do with the money I didn’t even know at the time we lacked, one I would do everything in my power to make sure Brody could never relate to, if given the chance.) “Are you sure that’s not, I don’t know, dirty?” I pulled my hand from Chris’s and began to pick at the thumbnail of my left hand with the thumb and forefinger of the right.

“Illegal, you mean?”

“No,” my knee started to jostle up and down again, “I know you wouldn’t suggest something illegal. I just mean, dirty, gross.” I took a deep breath and shook my head. “I don’t want this to turn into something where it looks like Chris is just throwing his money around,” I tossed my hands up into the air then let them fall to rub up and down my thighs, “like he’s, I don’t know, trying to  _ buy  _ Brody. Like you said, people respect him.” The words began to speed up and I felt my heart starting to race, my voice growing almost frantic. “And he’s earned that reputation. I don’t want -”

Chris unwound his arm from my waist and reached across me with both hands, trapping mine between his and holding them down against my legs. “Hey, baby, it’s okay.”

I looked over at him and saw that he didn’t look nearly as concerned as I felt. He smiled at me softly, sweetly, and my breath caught in my chest. “Chris,” I shook my head, “I don’t -”

“Mrs. Evans,” Ms. Donovan interrupted, “I can promise you, as a professional and, well, I’m going to play the ‘mom’ card again here, I will not let it look like that.” Her eyes were wide and her hands were open, splayed flat toward me. “I will make sure it is handled with the utmost delicacy and  _ no one  _ will be able to say that about your husband.” She kept looking at me as if she expected some sort of response, so I nodded weakly. 

Chris tightened his hands around mine. “And, hey, look at me,” I turned until I could just see him by looking up and out of the corners of my eyes, “if they do, they do.” My shoulders fell and I looked up at him more fully. “This is way,  _ way  _ more important than what gossip magazines and social media think of me. Okay?” I didn’t like it, but I knew there was no point in arguing with him over it. Bringing Brody into our home may have started as my idea, but I knew that the moment Chris said he was all in, he would never be anything else. But while I wanted it just as much as he did, I also felt like I needed to look out for him in the process, mainly because, as he was proving, I knew he would put himself at the bottom of the priority list throughout the entire process. So I just nodded. “Okay?” he prodded.

“Okay.”

“Okay.” He squeezed my hands again and leaned in to kiss me softly. “I love you.”

He refused to pull away until I responded. “Love you back."

Once he sat back, his left hand still wrapped around my right one and the other curled over his knee, he cleared his throat and turned his attention back to the attorney in front of us. “So, uh, Ms. Donovan, is there anything else we need to cover today?”

She sent us a soft smile and nodded gently. “Yes, just one last thing that you should know will probably come up if we do end up having to fight this. Your work schedule,” she paused for a second and sighed, scrunching her face a little as if she felt bad for what she was saying, maybe for everything she’d said so far, “the more we can assure a judge this will be a two-parent household, the better.”

“Oh,” Chris shook his head and lifted his hand off his knee to hold it up toward her, “no problem there. I’ve cut back a lot over the last couple years, down to only one big job a year and then some producing, a little directing here and there, small stuff here in Boston or occasionally in New York, but that’s a relatively easy commute and I can work my schedule however I need to so I’m around as much as possible.” 

He’d been saying he was going to do that since before he and I even met, his release from his Marvel contract (and the long-term financial stability it had provided, assuming he didn’t do anything stupid) playing heavily into the decision. He hadn’t completely followed through with that though, at least not the way I think he meant when he said it. Hell, if he had, we might never have met. Once we’d gotten serious though, he’d also gotten more serious about that decision. I’m not saying I was the reason for it necessarily, but I do think that our relationship, and the way we’d both settled into it - and into one another - so easily and comfortably, had been just one more factor pushing him to want to settle down and live more ‘normally.’ I certainly had never complained about having him home not only for bed but even for dinner most nights, and I’d seen nothing in him to make me think he regretted the decision. Acting less meant that he had more time and mental capacity to devote to other projects and issues he was passionate about, and it meant that when he did act, those few months out of every year, he was renewed, refreshed, and had more energy to throw himself into it than he had in the last couple years before we met. In all, it was a move we were both really happy with. 

“I’d already told my team that, as much as we can, I’d like to limit west coast or distant location stuff to the summers. Originally that was so she could come along,” he paused just long enough to turn and wink at me, then rolled on, excited and a little nervous, I thought, “at least for part of the time, but it has to be a plus here too, right? I mean, Brody can come along too, or if that’s not allowed, then, I’ll suck it up and deal with her staying back. She’ll be off work to be with him when school’s out, and I’ll come back home to be with them every time I’ve got more than two days off consecutively. And I mean, all my family’s here, so that’s gotta be in our favor?”

Ms. Donovan actually laughed, for the first time during the whole meeting, I thought, and sat back in her seat, her hands coming up in surrender. “Okay, okay. I can see you two have thought about this a lot. And yes, all the things you just said will definitely work in your favor. And I will definitely try to work it into the guardianship contract that you two are allowed to take him across state lines when school isn’t in session so that you don’t have to give up having your wife with you. We’ll call it,” she trailed off and studied our ceiling for a moment, “an educational opportunity for him.” She grinned at Chris then winked congenially at me.

“Oh thank god,” he sighed and the lawyer and I both laughed, “because I really want her to come along. And Brody too, now.”

Chris had never even met Brody, and yet, I didn’t doubt his honesty or sincerity for one second. From the moment he told me he was on board at our dining room table, he was just that. It had probably started as a simple desire to help a little boy who needed it. Hell, at first we hadn’t even known if Brody’s biological parents were still in the picture or how long he would probably need a home. But I knew, even though he hadn’t said it out loud, that a part of Chris had already started thinking about what it would mean to become a parent. They were little things, really - sitting at the table with his sister after dinner a few evenings earlier to ask a million questions about the day-to-day logistics of life with her kids (the  _ real  _ stuff, not the  _ fun uncle  _ stuff) instead of getting up to play with the kids, the Amazon package that showed up on our doorstep to fill in the few gaps in our Disney and Pixar collection, the way he asked, after dragging me to the toy aisle in Target, if I thought  _ our boy  _ would prefer a puzzle or a coloring book (then ended up buying both anyway) - but they were there nonetheless. It was sweet, and honestly adorable, but I also couldn’t help but worry that he would get his heart broken if things fell through, or, maybe worse, if they didn’t, and if Brody came to live with us, then left us again after only a short time. 

Truth be told, I was also worried that  _ I  _ would get  _ my  _ heart broken. But I didn’t let myself worry about that. I wanted to make sure to put Chris first in that regard. I had to, because this whole thing had been my idea, something I’d considered and nearly plotted behind his back then sprung on him, and if he got hurt that was on me. He wouldn’t see it that way, of course, and he would probably be angry if he knew that I did. So, I let him comfort me, the way I knew he wanted to, any time I got nervous about the whole situation, because I knew that inside his own head he was probably doing his own version of what I was doing, worried that his strong, long-held desire to be a father had pushed me to want to bring Brody into our family for his sake more than my own. It wasn’t the most honest way to approach the situation, I knew, but that was kind of what we’d always done; we both wanted to take care of one another, but we also both knew the other would fight it every step of the way. So sometimes we pretended - we pretended not to notice when the other went into ‘protector’ mode, or we pretended not to be doing it ourselves. It didn’t usually last as long as it had that time, because we both saw through one another so quickly (I didn’t hate that, because it reassured me that, like me, he didn’t lie about the things that actually mattered). And we had never done it to one another at the same time before (I didn’t hate that either, because the fact that we were doing it then reassured me that we were both 100% in on this thing I’d started).

Ms. Donovan only smiled like she’d been through this a hundred times before. And maybe she had. I could only hope that her years of experience would mean good things for us. “Well, Mr. and Mrs. Evans,” she reached for the briefcase beside her chair and began putting away the portfolio she’d pulled out at the beginning of the meeting, , “I think that covers everything that was on my list for the day. If you guys are good to move forward, and it seems that you are, I’ll file the petition first thing tomorrow morning. Yeah?” She lifted her eyebrows and tilted her head a little, awaiting our response.

Chris nudged my knee with his and raised one eyebrow when I turned to him. As usual, he was going to let me make the call first. I smiled at him, his own smile blooming as I did, before turning back to the -  _ our  _ \- attorney. “Yes please.”

“Yeah,” Chris added, his hand tightening around mine as he nodded, “definitely.”

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step." ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.


	4. What Matters Most

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Okay, who's ready to meet Brody??

_4 weeks later (mid March, Year 6)_

“I know they say dogs and their owners start to look alike after a while, but this is ridiculous.” I spun away from the floor-to-ceiling window beside the front door when I heard Chris’s teasing voice behind me. “It’s bad enough that we have to clean doggie nose-prints off the glass, are we going to have to clean yours too?”

“Very funny, smart ass.”

“Yeah, you better get all that ass-talk out now. You’re going to have to clean up that potty mouth of yours with a little one in the house full-time.” He smirked at me and put up one hand to block the slap I aimed at his opposite shoulder. He captured my hand in his and used it to pull me close, away from the window. 

“You’re one to talk,” I grumbled into his chest.

He kissed the top of my head as he wound his arms around my waist. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m a good boy,” he mumbled into my hair. “You’re just a bad influence.” He kissed me again then settled his chin on top of my head, laughing when I smacked his butt. A quiet settled over us, and I let my own arms wrap around him, my cheek settling against his chest. Neither of us said anything for a minute or so, just holding each other in the entryway of our home, and for as calm, as peaceful, as we must have looked on the outside, on the inside I felt anything but. And if the quick, sharp cadence of Chris’s heart against my cheek was any indication, so did he.

It had been four weeks since we’d met with our attorney in our living room, discussing what we had thought then could be a long, drawn-out fight to bring a sweet six-year-old into our home and out of a situation that could range anywhere from bad to truly terrible, we didn’t know (even with what information I managed to get out of Mac, we couldn’t really be sure). Our lawyer, Ms. Donovan, had warned us that there was a good chance the current foster family would put up a fight to try to keep Brody with them, not because they really cared about him, but because of the check that showed up in their mailbox every month. Apparently, though, they wanted to stay out of the courts more than they wanted the money, because a few days later, when Brody’s case worker called them after receiving the petition for legal guardianship that had been filed by Ms. Donovan and told them that another family was interested in fostering Brody and was willing to go to court to make it happen, they’d said, essentially, _If they want him that bad, they can have him_. The comment had set me so on edge that Chris had taken the phone from my hand to thank Ms. Donovan for sharing the good news before hanging up and taking one of my hands in each of his, rubbing his thumbs firmly over my palms again and again until he’d finally managed to push out all the tension.

The process had slowed a little after that, as tends to happen when anything has to work its way through the court system. And even though I knew there wasn’t actually anything holding it up aside from standard bureaucratic red tape, I felt like I hadn’t truly breathed since before we sat down with our attorney. If anything, Chris should’ve considered it a blessing that I had only been at the door for about five minutes, rather than since the moment I had woken up that morning. 

I jumped when I heard the sound of a car door closing, then, a few seconds later, another. For a second, Chris didn’t loosen his grip, his arms still tense and tight around me. Then he let go, tucked his hands into his pockets, winked at me when I looked up at him with wide, nervous eyes, and jutted his chin at the door in a signal for me to open it, the way he knew I was almost trembling to do. I took a deep breath, pulling the air in through my nose and blowing it slowly back out my mouth, before turning slowly toward the door. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel that Chris was only a step behind me, at most, as I moved forward.

I forced myself to move slowly, steadily, and I was just pulling the door open as Brody was stepping onto the front porch, guided by a hand on his shoulder. He stalled a little when he saw us in the doorway, and the case worker squeezed his shoulder then stepped forward to close the gap between us. 

“Hi Marcus.” I had been on a first-name basis with the representative from social services since about the second week of the process. Between home visits and my (probably excessive) phone calls to check on Brody, I’d talked to him more over the past weeks than almost anyone, aside from anyone with the last name ‘Evans’ and the students and coworkers I spent eight hours a day with.

“Good afternoon Mrs. Evans,” he reached to shake hands first with me, then with Chris, who stepped forward until he was just over my right shoulder, his left hand resting on the small of my back as the right one extended toward Marcus, “Mr. Evans. I have someone I’d like you to meet, officially. This,” he looked down and slightly behind him to the six-year-old still standing just at the edge of the porch, his little fingers pulling at the bottom of his t-shirt where it hung out below his winter coat, “is Brody.”

I stepped out onto the porch and knelt down, one knee resting on the wood, so that I was eye level with him. “Hi Brody, we met once before.” He didn’t make eye contact with me, and I looked up at Chris over my shoulder. He nodded, just barely, _go on_ , and I swallowed to try to force down the lump in my throat before turning back around. “Do you remember me? From the school?”

Finally, he stepped forward. I could have reached out and touched him if I’d tried, though I didn’t. “You’re Mac’s teacher.” His voice was quieter than I remembered it from the day over a month earlier in my classroom.

“Yeah!” I grinned, wide and, hopefully, welcoming, and nodded. “Good memory!” I turned to look back up at Chris and he had stepped out onto the porch as well. “And this is my husband, Ch-”

“Captain America.” Brody’s eyes were wide and his voice was breathy, full of wonder.

I could tell Chris was caught a little off guard, because I saw his eyebrows shoot up just the tiniest bit, but he recovered quickly and came down to Brody’s and my level, resting his left forearm on his still-raised knee and leaning in as he extended his right hand. “Hi buddy, it’s so nice to meet you.” I wasn’t sure if he was even aware of how fluidly he slipped back into being ‘Steve Rogers,’ even after all those years, or if it was something that happened involuntarily, but his voice was smoother, a little deeper than normal, and there was no trace of the Bostonian lilt that had been there only minutes before.

“Cap,” Brody replied, still clearly in awe of the man in front of him.

Chris wrapped his hand around Brody’s, dwarfing it, when the little boy lifted his to shake. “Yeah,” Chris drawled, nonchalant, “but, you can call me Chris, if you want.” Brody blinked twice then took a step back, pulling his hand from Chris’s and twisting it into the bottom of his shirt. “But hey,” I could hear the near-panic in Chris’s voice, “Cap is fine. I like Cap.” He nodded and his eyebrows knitted together, only relaxing when, after a couple seconds of awkward silence, Brody took half a step forward again, not as close as he had been, but closing the gap between him and us slightly.

“Hey Brody,” Marcus started, resting his hand on the top of Brody’s head, “you’re going to be staying here now, with Mrs. Evans and,” he looked down at us, almost as if he were asking permission, and Chris just shrugged a _whatever you want to say_ shrug, “Cap.” Brody didn’t seem to flinch at that, and the three of us let out a collective sigh of relief. “Do you think that’ll be okay?”

Brody didn’t look at the man who had just spoken to him, turning his gaze instead to me. “You let me color at school.” He pulled his hands from under his shirt and tucked them into his jacket pockets, rocking a bit on his little feet.

“That’s right,” I smiled and reached toward him, slowly. When he didn’t move or turn away I wrapped my hand lightly around the upper part of his arm, brushing my thumb over the front of his shoulder. “I did. We have stuff to color here, too,” I pointed over my shoulder, into the house, with the thumb of my other hand, “if you want.”

“Hey buddy, want me to take you and show you all the coloring stuff we have?” Chris stood slowly and extended a hand to Brody, who looked first at him, then over at Marcus.

“It’s okay, you can go.” Marcus nodded. “I probably won’t be here when you’re done, though, okay? But Mr. and Mrs. Evans,” Brody’s brow furrowed and I thought I actually saw him tense, “ _Cap,_ and Mac’s teacher, they’re going to take care of you and they have a room just for you and everything. How does that sound?”

Brody seemed to study his case worker for a moment - probably a few seconds, though it felt like an eternity - then he turned his scrutiny to me, then, finally, to Chris. After looking at him for a few seconds, he finally said, quietly, “Okay.” The way he said it, so resigned, as if it really didn’t matter to him one way or the other, broke my heart. I didn’t want him to put up a fight, of course. I didn’t want to have to beg him to come into our home and stay with us, to trust us. But the defeated way he just gave up, like he was used to being passed from one place to another, one ‘family’ to the next, hurt me deep in my heart and soul.

Marcus put on a much more positive show. “Okay, awesome.” He grinned and ruffled Brody’s hair. “I’ll be back to visit you soon, and if you need anything at all they’ll call me, alright? But I don’t think you’re going to need me, I think you’re going to be just fine.” He looked down with wide eyes and a hopeful smile. Brody only nodded, his facial expression unchanging. “Bye buddy, I’ll see you later.”

“Bye.” That seemed resigned as well. He was used to Marcus leaving him. I didn’t blame Marcus, of course, he was only doing his job. But I couldn’t help but be a little angry over the whole situation. 

Chris wiggled his fingers a little on the hand that was still extended toward Brody. He didn’t say anything until Brody had nestled his hand there, then he reached to squeeze my shoulder and said gently, “Come on, let’s go color. What’s your favorite thing to color?” Brody didn’t answer, but that could have been because Chris didn’t give him an opportunity to, turning and guiding him toward the front door as he kept talking. “I like animals. And Disney. Do you like Disney?” I couldn't hear Brody’s response, because they’d already receded into the house, but he must have said something, because I did hear Chris’s much louder reply, excited and boisterous, “Oooh, that’s a good one. I think we might have -”

When Marcus spoke again I was forced to take my attention away from my husband’s still chattering, cheerful voice. “So, I have his bag out in the car -”

I frowned and turned my attention back to the case worker. “Bag? Just one?”

The look Marcus gave me as we headed down the steps and onto the walkway toward his car, parked just in front of the closed garage door, contained something that looked a lot like pity, and I didn’t understand why. “Yeah,” he sighed heavily at the end of the word and pressed the button on his key ring to pop the trunk, “he had more when we first took him to the last home, but now he’s down to just this.” I stood by the back door, my hand on the roof of the car, as Marcus reached into the trunk and pulled out a plastic garbage bag, about three quarters full. Marcus wasn’t looking at me, focused on his own hand as he pulled down the trunk lid, and I made sure to clear the shock and disgust from my face before he turned back toward me. I don’t know what I expected, but from what I’d learned over the past month or so, I was convinced that Brody’s mother hadn’t sent him into state custody with a few things in a trash bag. So somewhere along the way, either between the group home and the last family, or since he’d been with them, something had changed. I wasn’t sure which was the more likely culprit, and I didn’t really care. I was pissed either way. It would do no one any good for me to let that show, though. 

Marcus came around the back of the car and leaned his hip against the fender, placing the bag into my outstretched hand. I fisted one hand around the knot at the top and pulled it close to my body, wrapping my other arm around it to hug it to my stomach and chest. “They said he grew out of everything else, and, at his age, that’s kind of hard to disprove.” Marcus shrugged, but it was less _oh well_ and more _I see this far too often_. “And he was always clean and physically fine whenever I came by for a visit, so there’s not really anything I could do, even if I didn’t feel great about it.” I wondered if he could see my jaw clenching when he stopped speaking and his chest and shoulders heaved on a sigh. Quickly, though, his eyes widened and he stood up a bit straighter. “Oh, speaking of visits, you heard me tell him I’d be back soon. As you know, I have to do a certain number of unannounced home welfare visits. But, if the first couple go well, and I’m sure they will, they become pretty infrequent. And I know you guys are both busy, so while I can’t officially tell you exactly when they’ll be, I can give you a call now and then to find out if you have some times that are better for you than others. Again, as long as the first few meetings go well.”

I shook my head. I didn’t want any special treatment. We would do our very best, but we would undoubtedly make mistakes, and I wanted to know about them. Chris was probably a better judge when it came to housing and raising a school-aged child - I was used to teenagers - and as we’d prepared to bring Brody into our home, he’d already pointed out a few places where my expectations of what was realistic for a home with a six-year-old were off-base, either because I didn’t realize how cautious we needed to be or because I’d seriously underestimated the abilities of a child that age. Still, even with him and his experience with his niece and nephews, things would be missed. It was Marcus’s job to tell us what those things were. “Look, Mr. -”

He smiled softly. “Marcus.”

“Marcus, I appreciate the courtesy that you’re extending us, no doubt because of who my husband is, but it’s not necessary. We’re prepared to be all-in on this. Chris is in one of his hiatus periods right now, so nearly anything he has to do can be done from home, scheduled during the school day, or, at most, will require one overnight to New York or D.C. And even when that’s not the case for him, I’m a teacher, so I have nearly the same schedule as Brody. Anything I do outside normal contracted school hours can be brought home and done sitting at the same dinner table the two of them are probably coloring at right now.” I was aware that I’d started to ramble, and it made me a little anxious not to have Chris out there with me to calm me down and rein me in like he was so good at doing. By that point though, Marcus and I had talked enough that he probably wasn’t surprised by it, and he only smiled a little wider.

He reached out to rest just his fingertips on my forearm where it curled around the bag. “Mrs. Evans, we don’t expect you to stop your entire life because you become a foster parent. Biological parents don’t do that.” He squeezed my arm a little then pulled his hand back to tuck his fingers into his pocket. “It will, of course, bring some changes, but you shouldn’t feel like you’re under house arrest.”

I shook my head quickly. “No, no, of course not. And we don’t, at all. But we do want to take some time, at least at first, to make sure he feels comfortable in our home, with us. If that means we rearrange our schedules a little bit, or do more work from home than usual for a few weeks, well, that seems like a more than fair trade-off.”

“I truly respect and appreciate your compassion and your desire to do what is best for Brody.” He tilted his head to one side and lowered his voice a little. “Just don’t forget to also do what’s best for you and your husband. It’s not uncommon for couples to struggle after having children. If anything, that’s intensified in a situation like this.”

“Thank you, I appreciate the concern, really.” I truly did. “We’ve already been in touch with the therapist Brody was going to before his previous placement to talk about restarting his sessions with her, and we’ve talked to her about the possibility of adding in family counseling down the road if necessary as well.”

Marcus’s hand flew out, palm out toward me, and his eyes widened. “Oh, I wasn’t -”

I couldn’t help but chuckle a little. I hadn’t meant to fluster him, but it was kind of funny. “It’s okay, really. Neither Chris nor I are touchy when it comes to the topic of counselling and therapy. We’ve also got a marriage counselor on stand-by, just in case.” I could see Marcus growing more uncomfortable. I could almost hear the thoughts running through his brain, fears about _Captain America_ and his wife out there telling people that _he’d_ told them they needed to go to counseling, that their marriage was in trouble because of the little boy _he_ had just dropped at their front door. I felt for him, but it was a little amusing at the same time. “Trust me Marcus, we’ve thought all this through. I know there are some things we’ve missed, some surprises that will pop up that neither of us considered when bringing a six-year-old into our home. But this part, we’re both prepared for. Or at least, prepared to handle.” And we were. We’d both spent plenty of time in therapy of our own, we didn’t see anything scary or shameful in the prospect of family or marriage counseling. Honestly, it was something we’d tossed around on our own shortly after we got married, not because we were having any problems, but because we wanted to keep it that way. Ultimately though, we’d decided at that time that we were both happy with the solo therapy we were receiving, but that we’d keep our options open in case that ever changed. When we’d decided to foster Brody, we’d also decided to revisit the topic more frequently.

“I think that’s awesome. Seriously. But hey, just my humble, non-professional suggestion?” He looked at me with raised eyebrows and an inquisitive expression. I nodded for him to go on. “Maybe just start with a date night once every week or two. It’s a lot cheaper than therapy. And probably more fun.”

My eyes fell closed and my chin dropped to my chest as I laughed softly. “Noted, thank you. Oh!” My hand flew out on reflex to rest on his forearm, my other arm tightening around the bag I still held to my chest. “That does remind me, Chris’s mom will be the primary childcare provider when we do have to be away from Brody, if I have meetings or conferences at school outside the normal day and Chris is also working, or for _date nights_ .” I grinned at him and he dropped his head, laughing softly. “Do we need to give you her information for home visits also?” It wouldn’t be a problem if we did, and we’d already let her know that we were prepared to do just that. She was, of course, beyond understanding about it. She’d been our biggest cheerleader throughout the entire process. The whole family had been wonderful, preemptively offering themselves up for babysitting duty and foster-cousin playdates, but more than once I’d caught the soft, supportive smiles my mother-in-law shot me across the dinner table, felt the warmth in her slightly longer than usual hugs, picked up on the fact that her calls to me - not _us_ \- had become more frequent, even more caring and maternal than they already had been.

Marcus only wrinkled his nose and waved a hand dismissively. “No, not right now anyway. As long as there aren’t any red flags with my visits here and my chats with Brody, that won’t be necessary.”

“Okay, sounds good.”

“Well,” he heaved a deep breath and pushed himself away from the car, resting both hands on his hips, “if you don’t have anything else for me, question-wise, I think we’re done here.”

I resituated Brody’s things in my arms once again and took a step back, making more space between myself and Marcus’s car door. I shook my head, “No, I think I’m good. Thank you for indulging me, I know I’ve probably gone way overboard with all my questions and explanations and everything else these past few weeks. I’ve always been an overthinker.” I could feel myself starting to blush and I scrunched my nose and smiled a little self-deprecatingly.

He put both hands up, palms out, “Hey, it’s really nice to get to take a child to a home where he’s wanted, and so clearly going to be cared for as well as I know you and Chris are going to care for Brody.” I must have looked unconvinced because he took a step forward and rested his hands on my shoulders, ducking his head a little to bring himself to my eye level, “I’d take a million questions a day from people like you if it meant all the kids under my supervision had homes like yours.”

I sighed, “We just want to be good for him.”

“Trust me, I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

…

Brody was quiet, somewhat withdrawn, all afternoon and evening, but not sullen. More than anything he simply seemed shy, or timid. He spent the afternoon at the high-top peninsula counter between the kitchen and the dining room, coloring in the _Dogs of Disney_ book Chris had picked out a few days earlier - one of many we’d come home with over the past few weeks. Chris sat with him under the pretense of coloring his own page, but mostly he just picked up crayons, held them between his fingers, then put them back down, all while watching Brody and making conversation the best he could. I sat with them for a while, trying to talk to Brody without pushing him. In the end, Chris and I did far more of the talking than Brody did, but I could tell he was listening to us, because every now and then his crayon would go still on the page or he would tilt his head a little one way or the other, and I knew one of us had said something that had caught his attention. That was all fine; we’d never expected him to run in and throw his arms around us the very first day. I was just glad he didn’t seem too terribly uncomfortable, or like he was just hoping Marcus would show back up to take him away any second.

When I got up to start dinner, Chris asked what we were having (a prompt, a cue-line, almost, to get me to say it out loud for Brody’s benefit, since Chris already knew from having been there for all my meticulous planning over the previous several days), and when I told them I was making my grandmother’s fried chicken, Brody’s head shot up. Mac had told me it was his favorite (though, he’d also mentioned that it had always been fast food, so I was hoping that my _actual_ Kentucky-born recipe would live up to the red and white bucket), and I was going all out - chicken, mashed potatoes, southern-style green beans, homemade buttermilk biscuits, I’d even made a pan of chess squares the day before for dessert, but I’d already given about two-thirds of them to the extended family just to make sure we couldn’t possibly eat them all and go into butter-and-sugar comas. It was a vast departure from the mostly healthy fare Chris and I usually stuck to at least five or six days a week, but I didn’t care. As I’d told Chris years before, cooking was my love language; if I couldn’t win Brody over, or at least make him feel comfortable and welcome, that way, I didn’t know what I would be able to do.

While I worked, only a couple yards away from where they still sat, I could hear Brody slowly starting to open up. He’d noticed Chris was far behind him on their coloring venture, and he must have decided it was because Chris didn’t know what to do with his picture, because I heard him say, in the same quiet voice we’d heard outside, “That’s Tramp, he’s gray and white,” and when I snuck a peak at them over my shoulder he had his finger pinned to Chris’s page. Chris just grinned, shaking his head and throwing one hand up in a _How did I miss that?_ gesture before reaching for the gray crayon Brody held out to him and lifting just his eyes to make contact with mine before winking. I tried to focus on dinner after that, but I caught myself going still from time to time, listening as Chris told Brody about his own favorite Disney movie at Brody’s age ( _Oliver and Company,_ of course, and I turned just in time to see him bite his lip when Brody held up his own coloring page and told him, proudly, “I got Dodger!”), or when Brody asked if the Hulk had ever accidentally hurt him when they worked together. I’d even, when I turned off the mixer after finishing up the potatoes, heard Brody laugh, a sweet, bubbly sound that had Chris and me looking at each other from across the room with slightly damp eyes.

He’d seemed comfortable with Chris - Cap, as he continued to call him - at first, but as the evening wore on after dinner, he began to gravitate more toward me, refusing to let go of my hand once we’d walked him to his room to unpack his things (meaning Chris did all the actual unpacking), handing me the book he'd picked off the bottom shelf of the bookcase, stocked with children’s books we’d gotten from Chris’s sister or ordered off of Amazon over the previous weeks, nearly gluing himself to my side as I read it aloud when we got back to the living room, and looking up at me wordlessly when we told him it was time for bed and asked if he wanted one or both of us to tuck him in.

“He’s met me before, with Mac,” I told Chris, feeling more than a little guilty, as we stood outside the bathroom door waiting for Brody to come out. Besides that, and probably more importantly, when it came down to it, it had been just Brody and his mom from the time he was two until just a few months prior. It made sense that he was drawn to the mother-figure in the house. I didn’t say that part out loud though. I couldn’t. 

“Baby, stop,” Chris drew me in with a hand around one wrist, pulling me off the wall and resting both hands on my hips when we were toe-to-toe, dropping his forehead to mine. “Right now, all I care about is that he’s comfortable. If you make him feel that way, I’m thrilled. Besides,” he kissed my nose and stepped back when we heard the sink turn on in the bathroom, “gimme like a week and I’ll totally be the favorite.” He grinned and wiggled his eyebrows as the door opened. 

“All good?” he asked, turning toward the bathroom and lowering himself into a squat when Brody came out. The little boy just nodded. “Okie dokie, well, I’m gonna go get ready for bed myself,” he reached for me, curling his hand around the back of my knee when I stepped closer, “and she’s gonna tuck you in. We’ll both be just down the hall the whole night, and if you need _anything_ ,” he lowered his voice, “I got ahold of a super special video transmitter,” a baby monitor, actually, but his way had to sound better to a six-year-old, “and all you have to do is say either one of our names and we’ll be there like _that_.” He snapped his fingers and dropped his hand to Brody’s shoulder so that he had one hand on each of us, and as I looked down at them, my heart stuttered a little. “Sound good?” Brody nodded. “Awesome. Good night, buddy.”

“Good night, Cap,”

Chris looked up at me for a second with an expression I couldn’t quite place, an increasingly rare occurrence, then replaced it with a smile and turned back to Brody, ruffling his hair and standing up. “Meet you back on the couch?” he asked, voice low in my ear, as he turned toward our bedroom, and I just nodded.

Ten minutes later, after getting Brody changed into his pajamas and tucked into bed fairly uneventfully, staying just long enough to convince myself that he wasn’t going to have a meltdown of some sort or a panic attack, I joined Chris back in the living room in my own pajamas. He held a glass of wine out to me as I approached the couch, an early round March Madness game playing quietly on the television.

“How’d he do?”

I stepped over his long legs and dropped onto the cushion next to him, careful not to spill my wine as I did. I nestled under his lifted arm and took a sip before answering. “Umm, okay, I think.” I shrugged. There hadn’t been any major red flags, but I didn’t actually know him, either, so I wasn’t sure how much I trusted my judgement. Besides, I was sure Chris had been at least half-watching through the monitor on the coffee table the entire time, so he probably already knew there hadn't been some major catastrophe.

“Did you give him his doll?”

“I tried,” I sighed. “He said he didn’t want it.” I shook my head and rolled my eyes as I said the rest. “Boys don’t need dolls, they need to be tough.”

He moved the beer in his hand from where it rested on his knee to set it a little roughly on the end table. “ _That_ shit.”

I took another sip of my wine and leaned forward to set the glass on the coffee table. “Yeah. I left it on the nightstand though.” I adjusted the monitor so I could see it a little better.

“Did he seem to like his bed? Is he comfortable?” I could hear the anxiety in my husband’s voice. Both of us wanted the same thing, for Brody to be safe, and comfortable, and happy. Even though we knew that wasn’t something we should expect right away, we would probably both be on razor’s edge until it happened.

“Yeah,” I nodded slowly, thinking about his question, “I think so.” I laughed a little then, thinking back to the only thing Brody had said while I was helping him change, _Will Captain America be here when I wake up tomorrow?_ “I think he might’ve preferred Captain America sheets over _The Lion King_ , though.”

“Yeeeaaahh,” Chris shifted, lifting his arm from my shoulders to rest on the back of the couch and shifting so his back was pressed into the corner of it and he could look down at me, “about that, how long should we let this ‘Cap’ thing go on? It doesn’t bother me,” I felt his hand rise and fall on the cushion behind me, “but I don’t want to let him do it if it’s like, messing something up somehow.”

I wrinkled my nose, considering his question. I hadn’t really thought about the possibility that him referring to Chris as ‘Cap’ might somehow be a negative thing, psychologically or developmentally. I just thought it was adorable, and that it might give them something to bond over. I finally shrugged. “I dunno, I say we give it a few days, maybe? Give him enough time to start to feel a little more comfortable with us.” I leaned forward to pick my wine glass back up, turning and draping my legs over Chris’s lap as I sat back. When I lifted my arm to prop my elbow on the back of the couch, my head resting on my knuckles, he let his own drop, his hand falling to my hip. “He has an appointment with his therapist on Wednesday,” I shrugged, taking a sip, “so if he’s still insisting on doing it then I can mention it to her when I take him in.” I certainly wasn’t dismissing the issue, now that he’d brought it to my attention. But we had a way of feeding off of each other, and when one of us was starting to spin out, the other had to stay level, grounded, or before you knew it, we were just one big anxious mess (we had two settings - either we helped and protected each other, or we set each other’s anxieties into motion because we each just wanted to fix things for the other and didn’t cope well with not being able to do that). I was just trying to be an anchor for him, the way he’d done for me more times than I could even begin to count.

“Sounds reasonable.” He nodded then chuckled a little, his fingers starting to drift, probably without a conscious decision to do so, across my skin just above the waistband of my pants where the hem of my shirt had gotten pulled up, “I am glad we took the dogs to Shan’s though. That might’ve been too much on the first day.”

“I agree. Although,” I drew out the word and tilted my head down, smirking, “I imagine he’ll be pretty excited when he meets real-life Dodger.” Chris laughed and slid his hand around to the small of my back, pressing his palm flat to the base of my spine and nodding as he did. “Are you still thinking it’s best to skip family dinner tomorrow, too?”

“I am.” He shrugged, not exactly apologetic, but close to it. “I know they’re all nothing but well-meaning, but they’re a lot.”

“They’re Evanses,” I agreed.

“That they are. Maybe next week. We’ll see how things go between now and then.” It almost came out as a question, like he was looking for me to affirm that he was making the right decision, so I lifted my head from my hand and reached across to work my fingers into the back of his hair. I smiled and nodded when he leaned back into my hand. “That’ll give me some time to keep reminding them that they can’t come in all hardcore ‘we’re you’re new family’ right out the gate and it’ll give us some time to connect with him, one-on-one. Or, two-on-one, I guess.” I nodded again and leaned over to kiss his cheek, pressing my forehead against his temple and whispering into his ear that everything was going to be good. He relaxed then, a little, settling back against the couch cushions and wrapping his arm all the way around my waist to pull me closer. 

Chris turned his attention back to the game, and I intended to follow suit, but I didn’t care about either team and it was a blow-out that was basically already over with eight minutes left to play. Even the allure and excitement of March Madness couldn’t overcome those circumstances. So I slid a little lower and pulled my hand from his hair to rest high on his thigh, just beside my own leg, drawing lazy circles over his soft flannel pants. My head fell to his shoulder as my other hand spun my wineglass slowly by the stem. It wasn’t any more exciting than the game, but my eyes focused on the much smaller screen on the coffee table; I found that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the small, still form sleeping in what had, until that day, been one of our guest rooms. (Well, it had effectively stopped being a guest room a few weeks earlier, when we’d traded out the queen sized bed for a much smaller one and filled the room with toys, games, and books we’d bought on a day-long shopping spree with Chris’s niece and nephews, but it had become official that day.)

“Chris?” I moved slowly and spoke quietly, for reasons even I couldn’t have explained, as I pushed myself up and reached to pull the monitor all the way to the edge of the table. It was like I was afraid of disturbing Brody even through the monitor.

“Don’t you dare thank me,” he warned. He must have interpreted my trepidation as hesitation to say what he thought I was going to say, the expression of gratitude he’d told me a thousand times over was unnecessary. I couldn’t blame him for being exasperated, given how many times he’d deflected my thanks over the past several weeks. “We’re in this together.”

I shifted my glass to the hand on his leg and reached across him with the other to cup his cheek, “And I love you for that, I really do.” I leaned in to kiss him and lingered longer than I meant to when he moved his lips against mine. “But that’s not what I was gonna say,” I told him when I finally pulled back.

He looked a little sheepish. “Oh. My bad. What’s up?”

“Look at the monitor.” I nodded at the small screen, where I could just make out Brody’s dark hair on the pillow, his little arms over the covers, wrapped around the doll he’d told me less than half an hour before he didn’t need. It was the same doll he’d had since before going into foster care, the one his previous foster parents had taken from him and that Mac had brought to me at school the day after I’d told him Chris and I wanted to foster Brody.

“Huh.” His head bobbed, then he unwound his arm from my waist and rested both forearms on my lap. He leaned forward to study the monitor, as engrossed as I had been. Finally, after a solid minute or more, he sat back and squeezed one of my thighs, just above the knee, with both hands. “Guess he changed his mind.”

“Guess so.” I waited a few more seconds to make sure he was comfortably settled then nestled against him again. I couldn’t be sure, because I couldn’t actually see his face from where my head rested on his shoulder, but I was nearly positive he spent the next several minutes doing the same thing I was - watching, rapt, as Brody slept peacefully upstairs in the bed we’d made up for him, doll tucked under his chin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “What matters most is we finally found each other, and that truth is stronger than the pain of our past.” ~ John Mark Green


	5. Conspiring

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Most of the comments I received on Chapter 4 mentioned toothache-inducing sweetness. Well, you may want to have your dentist on speed dial for this one.

_ 6 weeks later (late April, Year 6) _

Chris and I had prepared ourselves for it to take several weeks, maybe even longer, for Brody to really warm up to us and begin to feel like our home was his. It hadn’t taken anywhere near that. The first morning with us, he woke up before either of us did, and when we got to his room we found him just walking around, looking at his toys and books with his hands twisting behind his back, like he wanted to reach out and touch everything but wasn’t yet sure if he could. He’d even made his bed, sort of (as much as a six-year-old can, anyway). By lunch, he was calling us Mr. and Mrs. Evans, which I could tell eased Chris’s mind quite a bit, and by dinner the next night we’d gotten him so that he was comfortable calling us by our first names about half the time. We settled into a routine quickly, me dropping him off at school in the mornings on the way to my own school and picking him up from the elementary school’s after-school activities program at the end of the day, even swinging him by basketball practice once a week or so to see Mac. 

Brody was every bit as sweet as Mac had said he was, and so clearly full of love he truly wanted to give. And by the end of the second week or so, he was asking if Millie or Dodger ( _ or both of them, so they don’t get lonely _ ) could come sleep with him in  _ his room _ . By the end of our spring break at the beginning of April, which Chris had cleared his schedule for as well so the three of us could spend plenty of time together - playing at the park, spending time at the lake where Chris had spent so much of his own childhood, building blanket forts and having Disney marathons when it rained for almost 48 hours straight - it felt like he was exactly where he was meant to be. I didn’t fool myself into thinking it was because Chris and I were in any way special; I knew it was just because it was as Chris had said from the beginning - that was what was supposed to happen, the three of us were supposed to find each other. That, and the fact that he was as close to an ideal child as I’d ever met or imagined.

I looked down at him standing at my hip as I finished scooping halved cherry tomatoes into the salad bowl on the counter in front of me. “Alright, carrots next,” he practically skipped to the fridge to pull out one carrot, then, thinking it over, another. He made his way back to me and held the carrots up proudly. “Thanks buddy.”

He stood on his toes, hands curling around the edge of the countertop and chin resting on his knuckles as he watched me shred the carrots with a vegetable peeler. “Why isn’t Chris home yet?” His voice was inquisitive, mostly, but there was a hint of concern in there too. “I like it when we all make dinner together.”

“Oh buddy,” I put down the carrot and the peeler on the cutting board in front of me and wiped my hands on my apron (which Chris had teased me relentlessly about the first time he’d seen me wear it years before, only making me want to wear it more) before resting one hand on top of his head, “I like that too. But Chris is with his mom right now at her theater. He’ll be home before it’s time to eat though, I promise.” I slid my hand down his cheek to cup his chin, squeezing gently for a second then going back to the salad when he smiled.

“Okay. And if he’s late,” he shrugged, “we’ll wait.”

I bit my lips for a second to keep from laughing at his assertive, matter-of-fact tone. “Absolutely.” I nodded once. “I promise you we will all sit down at the table together.” As soon as it had become clear that Brody was fitting in and feeling comfortable in our home, it became equally clear that the concept of family was very important to him and that he had a high level of anxiety around the possibility of losing whatever family he felt that he had. It wasn’t a surprise, knowing how he’d lost his father years before, then watched his mother get sicker and sicker until she felt she could no longer take care of him. And it made it that much more heartbreaking to know what he’d been through once that day had come.

He nodded and rested his chin back on his hands, and I went back to the carrots. “I like Ms. Lisa.” He said when I set aside the end nub of the first carrot and picked up the second. I smiled at the way he said it, as if it was something he’d been studying over for a while and had finally come to a decision; while he certainly had his moments of being a classic, precocious six-year-old, there were just as many times when I felt like I was talking to a 30-year-old man. 

“Yeah? You’ve had a good time with her taking you to school?” Mrs. Evans had been offering her help - begging us to accept it, really - since day one. After spring break, we’d decided to take her up on her offer. While it was possible for me to get Brody to school in the mornings, doing so meant that I got to my own school quite a bit later than I was comfortable with, taking away my ‘settling-in time.’ It was certainly a sacrifice I was willing to make, but as Marcus had pointed out, it was important that none of us, Chris, Brody, or me, felt like we were being strained too much. So once we were confident that he was comfortable with us and that having Chris’s mom take him to school wouldn’t cause him to feel like he was being pawned off or abandoned, we decided to give it a try. She showed up every morning about 15 minutes before I left, just as the three of us were finishing up our breakfast, got Brody ready for school once I was gone and Chris was settling into work of his own, then drove him. In addition to lifting a little bit of weight off Chris’s and my shoulders, we liked the idea because as thrilled as we were that Brody was clearly growing comfortable with, and even attached to, us, we didn’t want to be the only adults in his life that he felt he could trust and depend on. The extended Evans clan would always be a prevalent part of Chris’s and my life, and as long as Brody was with us - which we were already hoping was going to be a very, very long time (the word  _ forever  _ had started crossing my mind with some frequency, but I was still scared to say it out loud) - they would be a big part of his. We wanted that to be a good thing.

I watched Brody out of the corner of my eye as he nodded. “Yeah. She’s really nice. And the last time we were at her house she gave me pie. It was really good.” He grinned widely for a second, then his eyes grew and his face went solemn. “Your brownies are better than hers, though. So is your chicken.”

Again, I had to stop myself from laughing. His earnestness was adorable. “Oh are they now?” He nodded emphatically. “Well, I’m glad to hear it.” I set aside the remains of the second carrot, right beside the first, and pointed my chin toward the fridge. “Cucumber, please. You wanna hear a secret?” I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned back against the counter, watching him. He nodded when he emerged from the fridge, cucumber in hand, and turned back toward me. “Chris thinks so too.” I winked and he giggled. “You can’t tell Ms. Lisa that, though.” I put on the sternest face I could manage and tilted my head down toward him. “Mommies always want their kids to like  _ their  _ food best, so she might get sad. Chris doesn’t like it when his mommy is sad, and neither do I.” 

His eyes went big and he nodded. He’d pushed himself as high onto his little toes as he could possibly manage; he may even have been pulling himself up with his hands, his eyes glued to the cucumber as my knife sliced through it even as he spoke again. “Chris really loves her a lot. She must be a pretty good mommy, huh?” 

I slipped him a slice. “She’s a great mommy, and a great nana.” 

He nibbled around the edges of the cucumber slice then popped all of what remained into his mouth. He started to say something, but I gave him the variation of my ‘teacher look’ that was quickly becoming my ‘mom look’ and he closed his mouth again, sheepish. Finally, once he’d chewed and swallowed, “Is she your mommy too?”

I couldn’t hold back my chuckle at that one. “No sweetie, not exactly. For me she’s what’s called a mother-in-law.” I finished up the cucumber and scooped it into the salad bowl with everything else Brody had helped me with, then turned my back to the counter to face him fully. I leaned back into the heels of my hands and crossed one ankle over the other. “That’s when you marry somebody and their family becomes like your family. She’s a really great one of those too.”

He cocked his head a little to one side. “So is your mommy Chris’s mother-inlo?”

“Mother- _ in-law _ , buddy.” I cleared my throat to push down the knot that seemed to pop up out of nowhere and turned back to the counter to clear the scraps that didn’t go into the salad. “And yeah, technically she is. But my mommy lives far away from here and we don’t see her very much.” I kept talking as I walked the few steps to the end of the counter, waving my cupped hands over the sensor on the top of the automatic trash can and dropping in the unused vegetable scraps when it opened. “That’s another thing that makes Ms. Lisa so great, she’s the only mommy around for both Chris and me, so it’s kind of like she does double-duty, but she’s still always super nice and loving and never complains.” I forced a smile and turned back to face the sweet little boy who was all eyes and ears, his full attention on me.

“Oh.” He nodded, “That’s good. So will I ever meet your mommy and go to her house, like I go to Ms. Lisa’s sometimes when you and Chris have to do stuff?”

I scoffed, but did my best to make it sound like a laugh. “Good grief, you are just full of questions tonight, aren’t you Little Man?” I went back to where I’d been making the salad and began cleaning the space, wiping down the counter and collecting dirty dishes and utensils. 

“Sorry.”

I stopped in the middle of putting the cutting board into the dishwasher, frustrated with myself for making him think he needed to apologize for asking questions. “It’s okay, you don’t need to be sorry.” I put in the cutting board and closed the dishwasher then turned back to Brody, kneeling to look him in the eyes and cupping one hand around his arm. “It’s good to have questions about things.”

“Can I ask one more?”

I grinned as I stood, glad that he seemed to be willing to move away from his last question. “Fire away.”

“Can I call you mommy, or are you something else, like my mother- _ in-law _ ?” I had just gotten back to my place at the counter and picked up the knife to take it to the sink to be hand-washed, and his question shocked me so much I dropped the knife. It hit the edge of the counter then clattered to the floor. Brody took a step closer, his hand outstretched as he bent toward where it had landed.

“Oh!” I jumped and lunged, putting myself between him and the knife. “No no sweetie, let me get it. Thank you for trying to help, but remember, you don’t touch knives unless it’s one of the special ones we hand you. Even if you’re careful, you can get really hurt handling knives.” He bit his lip and took a step back, nodding as he did. Once I’d picked up the knife and laid it carefully in the sink, I walked back to Brody, using a hand on his shoulder to guide him with me around the end of the peninsula and to the dinner table. I sat in one of the chairs and guided him to stand between my knees, letting my thumb drift over his cheek when I cupped one hand around the side of his neck and rested the other on top of his on my knee. “Brody, sweetie, are you sure you definitely want to call me mommy? You don’t have to do that, you know. It doesn’t hurt my feelings or anything if you don’t.”

He nodded without hesitation, like it was something he’d already thought through. “Yeah. You do all the things mommies are supposed to do,” he shrugged, “just like my first mommy did.” We never forced Brody to talk about his mother, because we weren’t sure what kind of negative effects that might have. But we also didn’t discourage him from it, and sometimes we eased him into conversations about her, asking him questions about things he’d done or enjoyed when he was younger, places he’d visited and trips he’d gone on. Some days it clearly wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have, and he would shrug and give a one-word answer before changing the subject. Other times, though, he would get on a roll and tell us long stories, like the time his mommy had taken him on a picnic that got cut short by a sudden downpour, resulting in her throwing him over her shoulder ( _ like a sack of potatoes!)  _ and running all the way back to the car, him shrieking with laughter the entire time. We wanted him to know how welcome he was to still think about her, love her, talk to us about her. And more than that, we wanted him to know we weren’t trying to replace her or erase her from his life. He could live with us for the next 12 years, until he was legally an adult, and she would always be his mother and we would never want him to think otherwise. But, god, the idea that he also saw  _ me  _ as his mommy _ , _ that he thought of me that way and that that’s how he wanted to refer to me? Well, the thought was humbling and beautiful and  _ amazing _ . 

It occurred to me that he was still talking, and that I should be listening, so I blinked away the tears forming in my eyes and focused on his face as he listed the reasons behind his request. “You tuck me in and give me snuggles and tickles and pick me up from school. And you just said kids are supposed to like their mommies’ food best, and I like your food best.” He just blinked back at me like he was patiently awaiting my answer.

I pulled him forward gently and wrapped my arms around his shoulders, pressing my face into the top of his head. He let his hands rest on my lap as his forehead hit my collarbone, probably unable to get his arms around me thanks to our somewhat awkward positioning. “Then yes, baby,” I said into his hair, “you can absolutely call me mommy if that’s what you want.”

“It is.” His nonchalance as he pulled away, even as I felt like I would fall apart at any second, spoke so strongly to the innocence and pureness of children. Unlike me, who over-thought absolutely everything, he identified something he wanted and asked for it, simple as that. It just so happened, in that instance, that what he wanted was a second mommy - in addition to the first, not in the place of, I would make sure to always be very clear about that - and, hopefully because he could already tell that I loved him with my whole heart and wouldn’t hesitate to do anything within my power to always protect him, he saw that in me. I was thrilled, and honored, and so full of love I might burst. 

“I’m going to ask Chris if I can call him Daddy. I don’t really remember what my first daddy did with me,” he shrugged, “but Chris does all the same things you do, except he throws me up in the air and plays monster with me, and his food isn’t as good as yours. But that means he’s pretty much a boy mommy, and I think daddies are just boy mommies. Do you think he’ll say yes?” His question and his voice were full of innocence, but there was a hint of something else in his expression as well - anxiety, fear maybe. He had been let down, by both circumstance and people, far more times than should be possible in his six years. He hadn’t been broken and he still carried hope, but he always seemed a little prepared to be let down again.

I wrapped my hands around his shoulders, rubbing my thumbs over them in what I hoped was a soothing motion. “You know what buddy, I don’t think you need to ask him.”

“Oh.” He looked down, studying the floor between our feet, “Do you think he’ll say no?”

“Oh no no no,” I tilted his head back up with a finger under his chin, “absolutely not. That’s why you don’t need to ask. I  _ know  _ he’ll say yes.” I narrowed my eyes and nodded slowly, hoping to encourage the message to sink in. Chris had never outright said the words,  _ I wish he would call me ‘daddy’ instead of Chris _ , but we’d had enough conversations about Brody and our situation and where we wanted it to go that I did know, without a doubt, that he was already thinking of Brody as our child and hoping Brody felt the same, or that he would eventually, just like I was.

“So,” he drew out the word and reached for my leg with one hand, drawing circles over my knee with his index finger, “I should just say it then?”

“Yep.  _ If that’s what you want _ , you should just say it when he gets home.”

“Mmm,” he appeared to think it over, like he wasn’t sure it would be okay to use the word without Chris’s permission, then finally nodded and took a step back, just out of my reach, “okay.” Seemingly deciding the conversation was over, and satisfied with the way it had ended, he made his way back into the kitchen to the island counter where I’d been putting together the salad with his help. “What else do you need me to get?”

I stood up, pushing my chair under the table. “You know what, I think I can take care of the rest of this.” I joined him at the island and picked up the salad bowl, handing it gently down to him, “Why don’t you take this salad -  _ careful,”  _ he wrapped his arms all the way around the bowl, hugging it to him, before I let it go, “and go put it on the dinner table, then go start a puzzle on the coffee table. Dinner’s almost ready and Chris should be home any minute, and after dinner we’ll work on the puzzle together. How’s that sound?”

His eyes lit up, “Can we do the  _ Toy Story  _ one again?”

I grinned, “Absolutely, Little Man.” I reached to pat the back of his shoulder, nudging him slightly toward the dining room. “You go dump out the pieces - carefully! - and start picking out the edges.”

I cringed a little at the sound of the cardboard pieces clattering onto the wooden top of the table, then rolled my eyes when I heard Brody shooing away the dogs, who undoubtedly came running at what they thought might be the slightest possibility of food. I was just pulling the lasagna from the oven, using my hip to nudge the door closed, when I heard the front door open and close and Chris’s voice sing-song through the house.

“Hello to my two favorite people, hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long! Oh babe, that smells incredible, give me two minutes and I’ll be ready for dinner!” I traced his voice as it moved from the entryway toward the living room, and I went to stand on the other side of the peninsula counter that divided the kitchen from the dining area, blessing the open floor plan that afforded me a clear view straight into the living room, where Chris was standing over Brody, watching him pick through the puzzle pieces. “Hey little man, what’cha,” he stopped and his eyes lit up the same way Brody’s had when I told him to go select a puzzle, “ahh, Buzz and Woody,  _ nice _ .” He dropped his hand to the top of our boy’s head and rubbed it almost roughly over his hair. “We gonna finish this after dinner?”

Brody stayed bent over the table, but the second Chris’s hand was off his head, he was reaching up to smooth the hair that had been mussed. “Yep. Mommy told me to pick out all the edge pieces.” I kept my eyes glued to Chris’s face, my hands running anxiously over the back of the chair in front of me, but he somehow seemed to have missed the M-word bombshell that had just been dropped, his own eyes scanning the pieces intently. He only tore his eyes from the table when Brody reached for his hand, using it to pull himself up. “Can you help me wash up for dinner?”

Once Chris’s attention was turned back to him, Brody let go of his hand and Chris clapped his own together, rubbing them briskly. “Let’s do it.” 

“Thanks.” Brody started toward the hall then looked back at Chris over his shoulder. “How was your day, Daddy?”

“I,” Chris had taken a couple steps in the same direction Brody had gone, his long legs closing the gap between them considerably, but he stopped abruptly, “uhh,” he tried to speak but the words caught in his chest or throat. He tried again, “Umm,” again he trailed off, planting his hands on his hips and staring down at the floor as he cleared his throat a couple times. Finally, he took one last step forward and knelt on one knee just in front of Brody, reaching for his hands. “Sorry, I had something in my throat. It was good.” He nodded emphatically. “A good, good day. I missed you two, though.” He pulled Brody just a tiny bit closer.

A grin split Brody’s face. “We missed you too. Me and mommy like it when we  _ all  _ make dinner together.”

Chris shook their hands between them. “Yeah, buddy, I like that too. I like that a lot. Hey, can I get a hug?” Brody nodded and Chris wrapped both arms around him, one low around his waist and the other across his shoulders, that hand coming up to cup the back of Brody’s head. I saw his eyes squeeze closed just before he buried his face in Brody’s shoulder, lowering his other knee to the floor and straightening up so that Brody was lifted off the ground.

“This is a big hug,” Brody mumbled into Chris’s neck.

He nodded a little, his nose and mouth still obscured in the cotton of Brody’s t-shirt. Finally, he pulled back and pressed his cheek to the side of Brody’s head. “Yeah, I like those a lot too.” He turned to kiss Brody’s hair, just above his ear, then finally let him go, setting him securely back onto the floor and resting his hands on Brody’s hips. “Okay, hey, why don’t you go into the bathroom and get your step stool pulled up to the sink, and I’ll be right there.” Brody nodded and took off down the hall, Chris staring after him as he stood. “And hey,” he seemed to finally pull himself together, “don’t play with the hand soap!”

Only then, as he was turning away from where Brody had just taken off down the hall, shaking his head, did Chris finally seem to realize I was there. He froze for a second, his eyes going wide. I can only imagine the smile I wore. He pointed a thumb over his shoulder as he asked, “Did you tell him to do that?”

“Nope.” I shook my head and pulled my arms from the chair they still rested on to tuck them into the back pockets of the jeans I’d changed into after school. He didn’t look like he didn’t believe me, exactly, but there was still a trace of doubt, or skepticism, on his face. I stepped back from the chair and started to make my way around the end of the table toward him. “Chris, no, I promise.” I shrugged as I went on, “I knew he was going to do it, but I didn’t tell him to. I would never do that.”

Chris blew a heavy breath out between his lips and shook his head as he moved toward me. “No, I know, I just,” I met him on the other side of the table, just behind the dining chair that had become Brody’s, and he looked down at the chair for a second before finally going on, “it came out of nowhere.” He tilted his head a little as he looked down at me, resting his hands on my waist.

I let my own hands drift up his front onto his shoulders. “I think, maybe, it didn’t.” I wrinkled my nose and tilted my head a little to one side.

His brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“When he was helping me make dinner,” Chris lifted one eyebrow and I rolled my eyes, “okay, when he was handing me vegetables to cut up for the salad,” he nodded and chuckled under his breath, “he got on this kick talking about mommies, and he asked me a bunch of questions about your mom, and was she my mom,” he pulled a face - eyes wide and nose scrunched almost in disgust - and stepped back. I slapped at his chest then fisted his shirt to pull him closer again. “Oh stop that, he’s six, he doesn’t know any better,” Chris grinned and wiggled his eyebrows. “Anyway, all that led up to him asking me if he could call me mommy.” I drew my eyebrows down and together as I looked up at him. “I think, I mean, it kind of sounded like he’d been thinking about it for a little while.”

Chris’s hands tightened around my hips, and I knew it was involuntary, an unconscious action, even. “And you think he did it because it’s what  _ he  _ wants? Not because somebody somehow made him feel like he’s supposed to?” I could see his eyes moving ever so slightly as they darted between mine, studying me for any hint of doubt on my part. 

“I  _ think  _ so.” I slid my hands down his chest and wrapped my arms around his ribs as I stepped closer, eliminating the small bit of space that had been between us, and his own hands moved to the small of my back, where I felt him link his fingers together. “I asked him if he was sure he wanted to, and he told me I do all the things mommies are supposed to do, like his first mommy did,” I grinned up at him, resting my chin right in the center of his chest, and he squinted down at me, “and then he said you do all those things too, which makes you like a boy mommy, and daddies are basically just boy mommies.”

His head fell back and he barked out a laugh, loud and almost shocking and so full-bodied that I had to take half a step back because of the way it rattled my body. “Oh my god, that’s perfect. That is fuckin’ perfect.” He dropped his head to rest his cheek on my hair. “He’s the coolest kid, our boy.” The last part was so much quieter, like it was only meant for him and me to hear, even though we were the only ones there.

Suddenly, we heard  _ our boy’s  _ voice from down the hall. “What are you laughing at in there? Are we going to wash up for dinner, or what?”

I flinched a little when Chris yelled back to him. “Yeah yeah, I’ll be right there, ‘ya little meatball!” He stepped back from me, shaking his head and grinning, “See what I mean?”

I smiled back at him and nodded my agreement, then a thought came to me just as he was turning to leave. “Hey, one last thing.” He turned back to face me. “He was going to ask you if it was okay, like he asked me, but I told him not to because you would definitely say yes.” I caught myself picking at one thumbnail with my opposite hand and felt the tension in my neck and shoulders as my body stiffened. “I didn’t,” my voice trailed off and I blew out a long sigh through pursed lips, my forehead furrowed almost painfully, “I didn’t do a bad thing did I?”

He closed the space he had put between us with one long step and grabbed my hands, wrapping them around his waist then bringing his own to either side of my neck. “Oh my god, baby, no.” He kissed my forehead then pressed his against it. “You did a very, very good thing. I don’t know what I would’ve said if he’d actually asked me. Shit, I probably would’ve cried.”

I pulled back just enough to see him clearly and batted my eyes up at him, the very picture of fake innocence. “I mean, you kinda did.”

His mouth dropped open and his brows drew down and together, three vertical lines forming between them. “You little brat.” His hands slid down to my shoulders and he gripped them, pushing me away and holding me at arm’s length. “That’s why you told him not to ask, isn’t it? You wanted to see my reaction when he just said it.”

I lifted one shoulder and tilted my head to that side, not even attempting to hide the smirk on my lips. “Maybe.”

“ _ Maybe  _ you’re gonna pay for that later.” His hands slipped under my shirt at my hips and he pinched both my sides, making me jump and twist away from him so violently it almost hurt my back. The look on his face when I straightened back up, lips pursed, jaw set, eyes narrowed but sparkling, told me he meant every word, but that I wouldn’t actually mind the payback. I just pulled his hands out from under my shirt and shoved them back at him.

“Go help our boy wash up for dinner,” I jutted my chin in the direction of the bathroom where Brody had almost certainly made a mess with the water, or the soap, or both, “I’ll get the lasagna on the table.”

He shook his head at me one last time for good measure then headed down the hall, mumbling almost under his breath. “Good fuckin’ day.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “I love you, because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.” ~ Paulo Coelho, "The Alchemist"


	6. Chaos

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "When little people are overwhelmed by big emotions, it's our job to share our calm, not join their chaos." ~L.R. Knost

_ 2 weeks later (early May, Year 6) _

By the time Brody and I got home from school, I couldn’t have honed in on a single, specific emotion I was feeling if I’d tried. I was anxious, irritated, exhausted, even scared. I hadn’t been any of those things when I’d left my school 30 minutes earlier, or when I’d arrived at Brody’s about 10 minutes after that. But between my conversation with his teacher, then my conversation - or lack thereof - with him on the way home, everything had gone more or less to hell. Something was bothering him, that much would have been clear even if his teacher hadn’t told me so when I went in to get him. But no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get him to tell me what. By the time we got home, after just over 15 minutes of me asking over and over, in every way I could think of, what was wrong, I was at my breaking point. My normally sweet, loving, talkative little boy was a moody, closed-off grouch. It may not sound like the worst thing in the world, but honestly, it somehow felt like the most difficult thing I’d endured with him since he’d come to live with Chris and me. Sure, it had taken him some time (not much, though, really) to fully open up and come into himself, but even in the very early days before he was completely comfortable in our home and with us, he’d never acted like he was that afternoon.

I watched him through the rearview mirror as I eased up the long private drive that led to our house and I couldn’t stop myself from chewing on the inside of my cheek. Even as I put the car into park, he stared down at his feet where they dangled from his seat, and when I opened his door to help him out, he’d already unlatched himself from his booster seat and he jumped out of the car without taking my hand, his backpack dragging limply behind him. He didn’t say a word, walking on without me as I collected my own belongings from the back of the car and waiting on the porch for me to come along behind him and open the door.

Chris’s voice rang through the house before I even got the door closed behind us. “Hello family! Did we have good days at school?” He grinned at us from the cased opening where the foyer and hall met the living room, but Brody didn’t even look his way. He just kicked his shoes onto the tray we’d put in the front hall when we realized how much  _ stuff  _ \- dirt and sand and heaven knows what else - a little boy tracked in on his shoes, and nearly stomped down the hall and up the stairs. The dogs had been sitting at Chris’s feet, but they jumped up to trail behind their smallest human as headed to his room. “Oof,” Chris looked at me and grimaced, “what’s with Mr. Grumpy Pants?”

I sighed heavily and shook my head, toeing off my own shoes and bending to tuck them neatly under the hall table with the hand that wasn’t holding my school bag onto my shoulder. “I don’t know. His teacher said he was off all afternoon, and our little chatterbox was nearly silent the whole ride home.” I shrugged as I stood back up and made my way to him, at a loss for what else to really say. “He normally talks non-stop, tells me everything, good and bad, but today he barely said 10 words, and only when I wouldn’t leave him alone.”

He rubbed circles over my back when I stopped to stand right next to him. “Want me to tag in?”

“Yeah, let’s give him a few minutes to settle in first though. If you go right now you’ll probably get the same treatment I got.”

“Fair point,” he nodded. “Well beautiful wife, how was  _ your _ day?” He used the hand on my back then to turn me and pull me into him, ducking his head to press his lips to mine. For a second he was still, we both were, then he worked his lips against mine, nestling them around my lower one and tugging a little at my pout. I followed him, pushing up onto my toes, as he pulled away.

I hoisted my bag a little higher where it had shifted as I leaned into the kiss then rested that same hand on his chest and smiled up at him softly as I let my eyes drift open. “Mmm, good. Better now. Always better after that.” I meant the kiss, of course, but I meant more than that, too. I meant his support, and his offer to help, and just the simple fact of seeing him standing there in our home and knowing that when I needed him, he was just going to be there. Always. Whatever was going on, whatever the problem was, we’d figure it out and work through it, together.

“Well,” he nodded at the bag that was once again starting to slip off my shoulder, “I see you have the  _ Big Bag of Papers _ , so let me just do the kids a favor, one more for good measure, just to make sure you’re in a good mood before you start tearing their stuff to shreds.” He winked then leaned down again, and I pushed myself back up to meet him halfway. Again he pressed his lips to mine almost carefully, and again he moved them softly, gently, against my own. He pulled back for a second and slipped his hand under the straps of my bag, then leaned back in for a longer, more powerful kiss. His tongue teased at the seam of my lips, and I felt him smile when they parted for him, a soft sigh passing between them. His tongue moved languidly across mine, and when he pulled away after a couple seconds, he took my canvas tote bag with him.

I kept my eyes closed for a second longer, my fingers tight around the seam at his shoulder. Finally, when I no longer felt dizzy and lightheaded from his kisses, I blinked up at him. “That was two.”

He dropped his head, letting his forehead bump mine. “Shh, you’re not a  _ math  _ teacher.” He grinned then kissed my cheek quickly before he pulled back. He held the bag up a little and slid his other arm across my shoulders then down my back and side until his hand curled around my hip so he could move us into the living room and toward the dining table. “How much you got in here?”

“It’s actually not as bad as it looks,” I assured him as we walked. “Only about half of it is actual student work, the other half is the articles they had to turn in  _ with  _ their work.”

He put my bag on the table and crossed his arms over his chest, looking down at me with one raised eyebrow. “So no rule breaking tonight?” 

The ‘rule’ to which Chris was referring was that neither of us would do more than one hour of work in the time that we’d designated ‘family time’ - the few hours between when Brody and I arrived home and when we put him to bed. That one hour generally gave Brody his own independent play time in his room or with the dogs, or allowed whichever of us was free to work with him on his schoolwork, so it felt like a good trade-off. There were exceptions made at times, of course, when I’d had midterms to grade and when Chris was dealing with a last-minute legal and contractual crisis with a new project he was co-producing, but in all, our system worked. If things were really hectic, the family would chip in, planning a cousin-date or  _ Nana’s Day Out  _ on the weekend so we could play catch-up, but even that usually happened more because one of them wanted it to and less because we needed it to. And honestly, the rule had the pleasant side-effect of giving us more couple-time as well, because usually, by the time we’d set the work aside for the night, we both realized we didn’t really  _ need  _ to pull it back out after putting Brody to bed and we were able to decompress together. Essentially, creating the rule in the beginning just helped us both realize the work usually wasn’t as important as we once thought it was, and that nothing was more important than the family we were building. 

The thing was, the rule was very necessary, because while going back to work had done a lot of positive things for me - it had given me a solid routine, made me feel more like I was contributing to our little family of, at the time, two, and allowed me to feel like I was doing something important and worthwhile (and consistent, the element that had felt like it was missing with my volunteer efforts), which was always so important to me. But it had also come with the negative side effect of pushing me back into bad habits - one in particular. I was terrible about bringing almost overwhelming amounts of work home with me. It wasn’t as bad as it had been in the months before Chris and I met (though even that fact caused me anxiety, because I often felt as if I wasn’t working hard enough, since I wasn't working myself to death as I'd done then), but it quickly escalated to the point that all I did on weeknights, and even sometimes on weekends, was prepare our dinner and work. Even when Chris and I were physically together, I was mentally buried in my classes. Chris wasn’t thrilled about it, but he was understanding. After all, it’s not like he didn’t have a demanding schedule of his own. So while he often encouraged me to take it easier on myself, he never complained, never outright demanded that I give him more time and attention. We both knew, though, that behavior in my part couldn’t continue once Brody was in the picture. Sure, Chris was more than capable of taking care of him, as long as he was home, but that wasn’t the point. We were in it together. We wanted to be parents,  _ together _ . It wasn’t fair to him, and more importantly, it wasn’t fair to Brody, for me to not live up to my end of that. So I’d set clearer boundaries for myself, I’d researched ways of giving more efficient but equally effective feedback on my students’ work, and I’d started using my planning time at school more productively. (Sure, I loved hanging out and chatting with my classroom neighbor on our common planning, but I loved my family more. And besides, keeping work more reserved for just work led me to appreciate my social life outside school more, a win-win all around.)

I huffed a little at his teasing and rolled my eyes, throwing in a little extra petulance just for fun. “Okay, first of all, that hasn’t happened in over a month and it was only by like 30 minutes.” I gave him my best  _ don’t try me  _ look. “But no,” I went on, “no rule breaking. I figured I’d grade for an hour,  _ following the rules _ ,” my voice was a little mocking, and he stuck his tongue out at me, “and Mr. Grumpy pants is supposed to read out loud to a family member tonight from his class book, so if you don’t mind,” I looked up at him from under my eyelashes as I started to pull things out of my bag, “he can read to you while I’m grading? After you see if you can sort out what’s bugging him.”

He scoffed. “Of course I don’t mind. Why should you get to have all the fun?”

I shook my head at him, but I had to grin. Like I’d told him all those years before, he was meant to be a daddy. “You guys can sit at the dinner table with me, if you want, family homework time.”

He nodded and knocked one knuckle against the top of the table. “Sounds like a plan.”

I continued pulling my things out of my bag, laying out the papers in neat stacks. “I’ll get dinner started after that and-”

“Oh!” My head shot up when he interrupted. “No need.” 

My shoulders sagged and I gave him an apologetic look. “Chris, sweetie, it’s a sweet thought, but I really don’t want to order takeout. It makes me feel so dirty if we do it more than once a week, and we already promised Brody pizza on Friday.”

“Nope.” He shook his head. “Not takeout.”

“ _ You’re  _ gonna cook?” I tried to look skeptical in a funny, teasing way, not an insulting one.

I must have succeeded, because his jaw dropped and his hand flew to his chest. “First,  _ ouch _ .” His expression shifted to one of smug cockiness. “Second, already did.”

I put on my best straight face, aside from my eyebrows lifting as high up my forehead as they would go. “You already cooked. Dinner.” He really wasn’t a terrible cook. He just didn’t do it nearly as often as I did. When he’d lived alone he’d had no problem either dropping by his mom’s for dinner a few times a week or just throwing a piece of meat on the grill or in the oven with a potato and a salad on the side. Those certainly weren’t  _ bad  _ options, but there wasn’t a lot of variety or creativity to them either. Besides, I actually really enjoyed cooking; I always had. It sometimes took up more time than I would like on weeknights, but I’d gotten pretty good over the years at planning meals appropriately for the day of the week and how much time I expected to have to make them. Still, it was a running joke between us that I was the reason he didn’t have his Captain America body anymore (his body was still  _ fucking  _ perfect, pun intended) and that I spent countless hours in the kitchen every week.

“Well, not completely, not yet anyway. I put a roast in the crock pot.” He looked so proud of himself it actually made butterflies spring up in my stomach. “Onions, potatoes, carrots, the whole deal, straight outta your binder of family recipes.”

“Oh yeah?” I dropped the strap I was holding to keep my bag open as I pulled student work from it and took the few steps needed to close the distance between us. “You better watch it mister, I’ll get used to this.” I fisted my hands around his t-shirt at his sides, pulling myself against him.

“Yeah?” He smirked and leaned back against the table, pulling me along so that I fell against him a little. “You gonna force me into an early retirement?”

“I might.” I kept my hands closed tight around his shirt and pulled myself up to plant a quick kiss on his lips - not quick enough that he couldn’t nip at the bottom one as I pulled away, though. “Okay, well,” I swatted at his hip as I made my way back to where my school things were, “if dinner is already taken care of, and you’re going to help Brody with his homework while I’m doing mine, what d’ya say we walk the dogs  _ before  _ dinner?” He nodded slowly as I settled myself into the chair. “Then, after, we’ll have some extra time before bath and bed. We can play a game with Little Man, or color, or work on a puzzle, whichever of his many fancies strikes tonight. Maybe some extra school night family fun time will feel like a treat for him, help with whatever’s up.”

“I think I like the way  _ you _ think. Alright, you set up camp, pull out all your pretty pens and whatever else you have to do, because in one minute” he held up a finger as if needing to emphasize his point, “I’m starting the timer. You get one hour,” he still held up that finger, shaking his hand in time with the words, “that’s it, then you belong to us again. I’m gonna go see if I can get our boy to spill.” I held up my right hand and touched it to my eyebrow, saluting him, and he just narrowed his eyes at me and shook his head then pushed off the table and walked away.

Chris had been gone maybe three minutes, just long enough for me to feel like I had everything fully organized in front of me and was ready to get started, when I heard the thud just over my head, followed by Brody’s voice, loud and sharp and unlike I’d ever heard it. “No! You’re  _ not  _ my real dad!  _ GET. OUT. _ ” I jumped out of the chair so quickly that I had to grab the back of it to keep it from toppling over and ran up the stairs, taking the last few two at a time.

When I got to Brody’s room, he was on his bed, arms and legs both crossed and a book just in front of him on the floor. Chris stood on the opposite side of the room, his back pressed to the wall just a few feet from the door and his hands clenching and releasing at his sides while Dodger sat almost on his feet and stared up at him. “Whoa!” My eyes darted between them and Millie ran to me when I got to the doorway. “What’s going on in here?”

Chris’s hands flew up defensively, “I,” he trailed off and shook his head, his eyes growing wetter by the second. “I don’t … ” his voice tapered off again and he looked over at Brody then back to me, his brow furrowed and his eyebrows drawn so tightly together I knew it had to hurt. The look on his face broke my heart. I had no idea what had happened before Brody’s outburst, but I knew Chris, and I knew that the words I’d heard had gone through him like a knife. His hands shook as he lowered them back to his sides, and I stepped just inside the room, close enough that I could reach over and tuck my fingers into his palm, my thumb rubbing circles over the back of his hand. 

I was going to ask again what had happened, but before I could, Brody snapped at me. “He’s not my dad.” My head whipped around to look at him where he still sat tucked into himself on the bed, but he refused to look at me. His voice was still sharp, angry, but it sounded sad too, and my heart broke a little more. 

I finished closing the distance between Chris and me and stood directly in front of him, reaching up with the hand that wasn’t still wrapped around his and curling it around his neck, tugging a little, gently, to encourage him to look down at me. When he did, I could see how hard he was fighting back the tears that wanted to fall. And he’d cried in front of Brody before, so I knew it wasn’t some masculine ‘boys don’t cry’ thing (not that Chris believed that anyway). Instead, I thought that, in spite of the way Brody had just hurt him, he didn’t want Brody to know that, to actually see it, because he didn’t want him to later feel bad about that too, on top of whatever else was already bothering him. “Okay, Chris, babe, why don’t you go check on dinner.” I nodded slowly and softly, almost like I was afraid of spooking him. “The last time I made biscuits I put some in the freezer. Can you pull them out and turn the oven on?” He nodded then, and I squeezed my hand around his and let my thumb brush across his jaw. I slid that hand down a little, just enough to rest on his collarbone, and without turning my body I looked over my shoulder toward the sulking little boy on the other side of the room. “Brody and I are gonna take Millie and Dodger for their walk.” I felt Chris nod again, the tendons and muscles in his neck and chest moving as he did, and I turned to kiss him on the cheek before finally stepping back to give him space to slip out the door. I turned fully toward Brody then, my hands resting on my hips to keep my arms from crossing over my chest. I wasn’t angry, not really, just very confused and sad for both of them, but the instinctive movement would definitely have made me look that way. “Brody, get your sneakers and the leash. I need to change.” I kept my voice low and even, but I knew he heard the seriousness in it, because he nodded without making eye contact, and I watched him slide off the edge of the bed before I turned to leave the room.

I went straight to Chris’s and my room and changed as quickly as I could, grabbing the first shorts and tshirt I saw - definitely  _ not  _ a matched set - and heading back downstairs with my socks still in my hand. When I got to the kitchen, Chris was standing in front of the open freezer, staring blankly into it. I tossed the balled up socks onto the island in the center of the room and went to stand behind him, rubbing wide circles over his back and pressing my lips to his shoulder through his shirt.

He didn’t look at me, didn’t move at all, when he spoke. “I don’t know what I did.”

“I know, baby.” I eased my way in front of him, stepping between him and the open freezer and reaching straight for the bag of biscuits I’d frozen a few weeks earlier.

“I was supposed to do that,” he protested half-heartedly as I slipped my hand under his on the handle and closed the door.

I smiled a little sadly up at him. “No you weren’t.” I made my way over to the stove to preheat the oven and pull a baking sheet out of the cabinet, thinking out loud as I did. “I’ll, I don’t know, I’ll get it out of him somehow.” I turned once I had four biscuits on the pan - an extra one for Chris to pour honey all over and eat with a fork once we’d put Brody to bed, assuming  _ we  _ did put him to bed that night - and made my way over to where Chris leaned back against the island, unfolding my socks and laying them out carefully side by side. I stood between his feet and pulled his hands from the countertop behind him to rest them on my hips - forcing him to touch me, to  _ be there  _ with me, and not up in Brody’s room reliving what had happened. “Just,” I shrugged, “just hang out and try not to spin out over this while we’re gone, okay?” He nodded and I leaned forward and pushed myself up a little to press my forehead to his like he so often did to me. “I love you and you’re doing an  _ incredible  _ job. We knew there would be bad days.” He didn’t acknowledge me at first, so I cupped his cheeks in my hands and pulled back enough to look at him sternly and finally, he nodded.

Brody was waiting for me at the front door, leash in hand and both dogs practically vibrating at his feet, when I pulled my sneakers out of the hall closet. I pulled them on and clipped the dogs onto the double leash and Brody opened the door without a word. We walked silently for a little while, Brody holding the leash about halfway down and on the side opposite the road like we’d taught him to do and the dogs trotting along happily, looking back over their shoulders now and then to make sure we were still there. Finally, after probably five minutes or more, once we’d made it to the end of our drive and a little way down the path we’d worn into the grass a foot or so off the shoulder of the quiet road, I asked, “Hey Brody, why did you yell at Chris like that? Did he do something that made you mad?”

He didn’t look at me when he answered. “He’s not my daddy.”

I spoke slowly, thinking each word over as it came out of my mouth. “No, I know. And you don’t have to call him that if you don’t want to.” I paused then, to see if he was going to say anything else, then went on when he didn’t. “That’s what you wanted to call him, and you can change your mind any time. But hey, you know what you can’t do?” He didn’t answer, so after a couple steps I stopped walking. First the dogs came to an abrupt halt when they ran out of leeway on the leash, then Brody did the same. I knew if I just waited him out, he’d eventually give me his attention. Sure enough, after only two or three seconds, he looked back at me over his shoulder, and I shifted the leash from my left hand into my right and held the newly free one out to him so that when he came back to hold my hand and walk with me I was then between him and the road. As we started walking again, I told him, “You can’t yell and say mean things and hurt people’s feelings. And you did yell, and you said a very mean thing, and you hurt Chris’s feelings very much. He’s very sad right now.”

“I’m very sad right now.” His voice was still a little testy, but also deflated, like he’d lost a lot of the fire that had been burning under the surface all afternoon.

“Why are you very sad?”

“Because.” It was starting to sound more like a pout. “You and Chris said I can call him Daddy, but he  _ can’t  _ be my daddy.”

He wasn’t looking at me, but I tilted my head a little to one side anyway. “Why do you say that?” I did my best to sound curious rather than defensive, which was definitely what I was starting to feel. I had a very strong sense that I wasn’t going to like whatever was coming any more than I had liked hearing him scream at Chris.

“Because. Cody said so.”

I took a deep breath through my nose and bit the inside of my cheek. I know it’s a terrible thing to say about a six-year-old, but I’d never liked that kid. He came from a family that nearly defined the word privilege. I knew it was unfair to hold someone’s family situation against them, considering where I’d come from myself and how different I was from my own family (and honestly, who was I to have opinions on privilege, being married to a man who consistently ranked on the Forbes “100 Richest Entertainers” list?), but on more than one occasion I’d seen the little boy treat almost everyone around him as if they were beneath him. As far as I could tell, he only had nice things to say to those who would suck up to him in order to gain his favor. Honestly, I was shocked the first few times that I met him that it was possible for a child so young to be so full of venom and spite. Keeping my voice as even as possible, I asked, “What did Cody say?”

Brody stared down at his feet, using the toe of his sneaker to kick everything he saw that wasn’t a blade of grass as we walked. “Cody brought his brother’s Avengers lunchbox to school today and it has Captain America on it and I told him Captain America was my daddy and he laughed and he said there’s no way Captain America can be my daddy because he’s the captain of America and I’m a dirty Mexican.” Like me, he had a habit of talking quickly, picking up the pace as he went, and by the end I don’t know that anyone besides me would have understood the rapid-fire, high-pitched, almost breathless words coming from him. I didn’t mean to, but I stopped again, pulling up short with no notice. “Ow.” I looked down and my knuckles were white where I held his hand in mine. I let go and lifted my hand to rest on top of his head.

“I’m sorry baby.” I looked ahead at the dogs, looking back at me for direction. “Millie, sit. Dodge,” he was already sitting before I had a chance to give him the command, “good boy.” I knelt in front of Brody, resting both knees in the grass, and slid the loop at the top of the leash around my wrist so both hands were free, wrapping them high around his arms. “Okay, first of all, what Cody said was very mean and very wrong, okay?” I paused and just looked at him until he nodded. “Mexicans are not  _ dirty _ and they are no different from anybody else.” I took a breath, reminding myself that I had to keep my cool as I talked to him. “A Mexican is just somebody who comes from a place called Mexico, or maybe their mom or dad came from there, or their nana or grandpa. It’s not bad to be Mexican,” I stopped again, waiting for him to look me in the eye so I knew he was following what I was saying. “It just means someone comes from a certain place and has certain traditions, things they like to do with their families that maybe other people from other places might do differently.” I could see him softening, the anger from before finally starting to drain out of him, and he just looked tired, and sad, and scared. I pulled him in and hugged him for a second, kissing the top of his head before I let him pull away. “And second of all, you’re not Mexican. Your first daddy was from a place called Costa Rica, which is a whole different place from Mexico. And they have some of those same traditions as in Mexico, and then they have some that are different.” I grinned, remembering something. “You remember my friend Natasha, who we called on the computer when we tried to make tamales?” That had been an unmitigated disaster, and I was still finding cornmeal in cracks and crevices of my kitchen for days afterward, but we’d all had fun, and though he was too young to really understand it at the time, Brody was getting to be exposed to a little bit of his father’s, and therefore his, culture.

His mouth twisted and his nose wrinkled. “You weren’t very good at that.”

Any other time I would have at least pretended to be offended, like I would have done with Chris, but I was just so happy to see my boy coming back out that I only laughed. “You’re right, I wasn’t. Hopefully one day you can meet Natasha for real and she can show you how to do it right. Anyway,” I took his much smaller hands in mine, squeezing for a second then just holding them between us, “Natasha’s mommy and daddy are both from Costa Rica, just like your first daddy.” I hated that he only barely remembered his birth father, just tiny snippets of memories here and there. And though I’d never known him, we’d been given nothing to indicate that he wasn’t a good person or wouldn’t have been a great father if given the chance, so that’s the way I always envisioned him when talking to Brody about him, even tangentially. I smiled a little at the mention of the man, then went on. “Before Natasha was born, her parents moved to the United States. So you and Natasha are both Costa Rican because that’s where her parents and your first daddy were born.”

I watched him try to make sense of everything I’d just told him, confusion and even a little frustration crossing his face. “I thought I was American. How come Cody knew I’m not?”

My heart broke again, for what seemed like the millionth time that day, and I sighed before answering him, using the moment to steady myself and clear my brain of thoughts of punching Cody’s mother right in her collagen-infused mouth for raising a son who had so thoughtlessly, so carelessly, and, probably, so gleefully broken my boy’s heart (and, by extension, my husband’s). “Oh, baby, you  _ are  _ American.” I pulled him closer and shifted, trying to relieve some of the pressure on my knees and find a more comfortable position. “You can be more than one thing. You and Natasha are Costa Rican Americans. Chris is Italian American, mostly, and probably some Irish American too.” I made my eyes wide, “And I don’t even  _ know  _ what all I am. I’m like,” I trailed off and let my eyes drift around my surroundings for a couple seconds, “alphabet soup.” I grinned, “Just a bunch of stuff all mixed together.”

My attempt to lighten the mood didn’t work. “But how did he  _ know _ ?”

I forced my smile to stay in place. “Well, because you’ve got this shiny black hair,” I released one of his hands to run my fingers through his hair, sweeping it unnecessarily across his forehead, “and these big beautiful brown eyes,” I cupped his jaw and traced his cheekbone with my thumb, “and your skin is so nice and tan.” I held my forearm between us and waited for him to lift his to run alongside it. “See the difference?” For once I was glad that I was exceptionally fair-skinned, even for a white person (and the move to Massachusetts definitely hadn’t helped with that - at least in Virginia I’d managed to have some small amount of color from June to September), because my point was much more clear than it would have been if I’d had a tan. “But none of those are bad things. They just help you know where your family came from, and as you get older you’ll be able to tell when other people came from the same place, or a place close to it, and you can talk to those people and learn more about where your first daddy came from and what kinds of things he probably did with his family when he was a little boy like you. And Chris and I will help you learn that stuff too, but I think you’ll like learning it from other people whose families come from there even more.” 

We’d been talking about that more and more. We certainly planned to do our research and learn as much about Costa Rican culture as we possibly could, especially if Brody was going to be with us long-term, which was what we wanted. But us telling him the things we’d learned in books and online, and videoconference cooking lessons with Natasha, who was halfway across the country, weren’t going to cut it. We’d started looking for cultural festivals and community organizations specifically centered on Central American cultures, and what we really wanted to do was to find a family, ideally one with a child somewhere near Brody’s age, who he - and we - could learn from. I didn’t want to put the burden of teaching me onto a person of a different race or culture, and I wouldn’t stop doing my own research, but I also knew that the things Brody would learn and the experiences he would have would be so much more authentic coming not only from us but also from people who shared his heritage.

Brody had nodded after everything I’d said, but he didn’t say anything himself. The dogs were starting to get antsy, and it kind of seemed like he was too, so after an extra couple seconds just to make sure he didn’t have any more questions, I stood up and suggested we keep walking. We went about another quarter of a mile, to our normal turnaround point, in silence, and I shifted Brody to my other side so he still wouldn’t be next to the road and headed us back toward home. A couple minutes in, he’d slowed considerably and was starting to shuffle his feet. 

“Hey buddy, you gettin’ tired?” I looked down at him and he nodded. Normally the one mile out-and-back was no problem for him. Chris and I were both very active and we’d started early encouraging Brody to be the same way. He was so young that it didn’t take much to establish the habit, especially considering Mac had gotten him out to parks and on basketball courts as much as possible when they’d been fostered together. That day, though, with the emotional toll everything had taken on him and the physical toll his anger had probably taken, it didn’t surprise me that he was struggling more than usual. I let go of his hand and held both of mine out to him, wiggling my fingers in a beckoning gesture. “C’mere.” I jerked my chin up just once, and he didn’t hesitate to lift his arms. Chris would have tossed him up onto his shoulders with next to no effort, and normally if I was going to carry him I would hoist him onto my back ( _ my little possum _ , I’d teased him the first time, leading to a whole afternoon of impromptu animal research), but we had less than half a mile to go, no more than 10 minutes even if I was walking slowly, so I figured I could handle having him perched on my hip, supported primarily by one arm, for that long. After everything, I just wanted to hold him, to wrap my arms around him and have him tuck his head onto my shoulder, if that was what he wanted. Even the dogs seemed happy to accomodate, watching us resituate then slowing their pace and creating more slack on the leash, which I’d handed to Brody once he was settled on my hip.

“I’m sorry I made Chris sad.” We were just turning onto the end of our drive when he spoke, voice small and full of regret.

I let my head fall to the side so my cheek rested on the top of his head. “I know you are. But you need to tell him that, not me.” He nodded and I pulled back. I tightened my arm around his waist for a second, and he looked up at me curiously. I put my ‘serious mom’ look back on, raising my eyebrows and lowering my chin a little. “And I know you were sad, but that’s not how we act when we’re sad, okay? We talk to people we love and we trust and we tell them why we’re sad so maybe they can help us. No yelling. No mean words.” It was actually really important to me that he got that message, probably just as important as anything else we’d talked about that afternoon. I’d grown up feeling like I wasn’t allowed to be sad, that my being sad was just a nuisance to others. I didn’t want that for him; I wanted him to know that his emotions would always be valid and worth recognizing. But I’d also grown up surrounded by the yelling and mean words I’d just told him were unacceptable, and I didn’t want him to resort to that as his only way of expressing his emotions. For his own emotional and mental wellbeing, more than anything else, I  _ needed  _ him to know that it was okay to feel his feelings, but that there was an appropriate and healthy way to do it. And I  _ hoped  _ that Chris and I would be the people, or at least two of the people, that he loved and trusted enough to do that with.

“Yes ma’am.” I knew it may be, in some ways, reinforcing bad behavior, but I couldn’t help turning to kiss his forehead. Everything about him by that time, the smallness of his voice, the way he wouldn’t look me in the eyes, told me that he was nothing but sorry, and probably still a little sad. I couldn’t stop myself from loving on him a little, even if he had gone about it in all the wrong ways. “Do I get time out?”

I turned away from him to make sure he couldn’t see my smile, then answered. “No, not this time.” He just sighed and settled his head back on my shoulder as I continued up the drive.

When we got to the base of the porch steps, I sat him down and took the leash from his hand, knowing he was too small to keep the dogs contained long enough for me to get them cleaned up and unhooked once we got inside. He reached for the hem of his tshirt, rubbing it anxiously between the thumbs and forefingers of each hand. “I liked calling Chris Daddy,” he told me without looking up.

“He liked it too, very much,” I told him as we moved up onto the porch. I tried to sound as casual, as nonchalant as possible, not sure how he might react if I made too big a deal of it.

He stopped me, reaching up to wrap his fingers around my shirt at my hip, when I reached for the door. “Do you think I can do it again?”

“Of course you can, sweetie. I think that will make him very happy.” He seemed to think about it for a second, then he nodded and let his hand drop, so I opened the door.

I watched him put his shoes back on the tray where they belonged as I wiped the dogs’ feet and freed them to go running through the house in search of Chris. Or food. Or toys. Or just because. It could really be anything. Brody looked up at me once he was set, awaiting instruction. I nodded down the hall toward the downstairs bathroom. “Go wash up for dinner.” 

Chris waited until Brody was gone to come out into the foyer from the main living area of the house. When I turned back around from putting my sneakers into the hall closet, he was standing in the middle of the opening into the living room. “Good?” His hands were tucked into his pockets and I knew he was trying to look relaxed, but I could see the tension in his neck. I only nodded, because as soon as Brody had walked away, every negative feeling I’d pushed down for his benefit had come flooding back, and I didn’t want to take that out on Chris any more than I’d wanted to take it out on Brody. “You’re nodding yes, but your face is screaming  _ I’m going to fucking kill someone _ .”

“We’ll talk about it later.” I walked past him toward the kitchen, reaching out to squeeze his forearm as I went.

He trailed a few steps behind me. “Later?”

“Later,” I repeated, opening the oven to look at the biscuits he’d put in at some point while we were gone. They weren’t quite done, so I went to the cabinet and started pulling down plates. He continued to follow me, and when I turned around I could tell he was about to ask for more information, but Brody came into the room and his mouth snapped closed. He stepped to the side, clearing the way between Brody and me, looking for all the world like a teenager who’d just been caught in the middle of something and was hoping that if he just stood still enough, it wouldn’t be noticed. I ignored it and met Brody near the end of the peninsula counter, plates still in my hands. “All clean?” He nodded. “You sure, do I need to do the sniff test?” He shrugged and held his hands up for me to inspect. “Alright, I trust you. Go set the table.” He took the plates from me and headed toward the dining table, Chris still standing on the opposite side of the island staring after him, not unlike a dog who’d just been told to  _ stay _ when all he really wanted was to tag along.

…

I’d hoped the tension would be resolved over dinner, that Brody would say to Chris what he’d said to me on our walk, or that Chris would try to check in, prompting him to open up, but neither happened. Even with his anxiety, it was probably the first time I’d ever seen Chris look truly scared; he’d been really shaken when Brody blew up at him before the walk, and while I’d known he wouldn’t want it to happen again, it almost surprised me just how carefully he was treading. Brody, for the most part, kept his attention on his food, looking up at me now and then in ways that made me think he might be about to say something, then he would look at Chris and drop his eyes again. Of all the things I’d tried to mentally prepare myself for as we got ready to bring Brody into our home, that dinner was absolutely not one of them. Even my own attempts to lighten the mood fell flat, and I didn’t want to just jump in and say,  _ Look Brody, tell Chris what you told me. Okay, now Chris, tell Brody how much you love him and that you forgive him _ . However, by the time bathtime rolled around, I was starting to think it might come to that. 

“Okay you, bubbles?” I sat on the edge of the tub, watching Brody scoop said bubbles into his

palms.

He leaned forward and blew them in my direction. “Check.”

I smiled. “Flounder?”

“Check.” He picked up the rubber toy and squeezed it, water shooting out of the top.

“Basketball?”

He looked around for a second, his eyes lighting up when he spotted the orange ball floating in the bubbles behind him. “Check.”

“Pirate ship?” I actually held the last toy behind my back. Brody had told me that he’d wanted that one to be one of the three he was allowed, but he hadn’t actually pulled it out of the toy bin under the vanity like he had the other two. He looked around again, his brow furrowing when he didn’t find it as easily as he had the basketball. I grinned and whipped the toy from behind my back, plunging it a couple inches into the water then back up again so that the water splashed him.

He giggled and flicked his fingers at me the way Chris had shown him, sending a small spray of water over the front of my shirt. “Check.”

“Well, Little Man, that’s three, you’re fully loaded.” I stood and turned toward the vanity, picking up the old-school kitchen timer we kept in there and turning the dial. “Okay, look, I’m setting the timer for 20 minutes, that’s five more than usual, okay?” He nodded and I set the timer facing him so he could see as it counted down. “But you know the drill, when the timer goes off, you pull the plug and then I’ll be in to get you. What happens if you don’t pull the plug before I get in here when the timer dings?” 

“I lose five minutes next time,” he told me confidently.

I nodded. “That’s right. Okay, you know the drill, you get to hang out in here on your own, but if you need anything, just yell, okay?” He nodded just once, an emphatic rise and fall of his head. “Okay. See you in 20.” 

We had the the half-bath downstairs that Brody always used when we were doing anything together on the first floor of the house or in the backyard and where he washed up for dinner, and he had ‘his’ bathroom upstairs, the one across the hall from his room that he used if he had to get up in the middle of the night or if he was in his room playing alone, as he liked to do sometimes. That was where he typically showered, one of us lingering on the other side of the closed curtain as he did (after Chris had climbed in with him in swim trunks the first few times to supervise and make sure he could handle it on his own, because  _ I don’t know the rules about this sort of thing! _ ). But when he got to take ‘fun baths,’ we put him in our bathroom. The tub was bigger, for one thing, but the fact that our bathroom was connected to the master bedroom meant we could step out and do our own thing for a few minutes - change for bed, put away laundry, whatever needed to be done in our room - and still feel confident that he was safe and secure and that we would hear him right away if he needed anything. So we set a timer, closed the door about halfway, and ‘left,’ letting him feel independent and like a  _ big boy _ for a few minutes and returning a minute or so after the timer went off, just enough time for him to fulfill his end of the bargain by pulling the plug like we always instructed him to do.

I pulled the door partially closed behind me and headed toward my walk-in closet to change for bed myself. I jumped when Chris spoke from the doorway, his voice low enough to not be heard by Brody over the music I’d left playing at a low volume in the bathroom but loud enough to startle me considering I hadn’t known he was there. “So what the fuck happened?” I shook my head at him when my shoulders dropped from where they’d flown up next to my ears and he grimaced apologetically. Instead of crossing to the closet like I’d planned to do, I sat at the foot of the bed and patted the space next to me. Chris just rolled his eyes. “Babe, just talk to me.”

“Come sit with me. Please?” I didn’t want to have that conversation with him halfway across the room, partially because I wanted to be able to talk quietly enough that I knew our voices wouldn’t carry into the bathroom and partially because I wanted to slip my fingers between his before I did, to hold his hand as I told him about the shitty day our boy’d had. His chest heaved, but he pushed himself off the door jamb and made his way over to me. Just like I’d wanted to, I fitted my fingers between his and rested our hands on his thigh. I took a deep breath, sighed, really, then started. “He was upset because a boy at school today told him you couldn’t be his daddy because he’s a dirty Mexican and you’re Captain  _ America _ .”

I jumped again, this time not because he’d snuck up on me but because his voice boomed right next to me. “Are you-”

I reached across my body quickly, frantically, even, to touch the fingertips of my free hand to his lips. “Shh, Chris, hey, our boy is right in there and he does not need to hear you yelling like that.” He squeezed his eyes shut and dropped his chin to his chest and I let my hand fall onto his forearm.

“Fuck.” He was much quieter, so quiet I probably wouldn’t have heard him if we hadn’t been literally shoulder-to-shoulder. “I’m sorry.  _ Fuck _ ,” he reiterated, still quiet, but more forceful.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “that about covers it.”

He kept his head down but turned to look over at me. “What did you tell him?”

“Well, first I told him, in six-year-old-friendly terms, that  _ Mexican  _ isn’t a slur or an insult and shouldn’t be used as one,” he nodded as I spoke, “and then that he’s Costa Rican, not Mexican, and as he gets older we’ll start introducing him to his heritage. Again, in six-year-old-friendly terms.”

For a couple seconds he just continued to nod thoughtfully, his lips pursed a little and his eyebrows drawn together. Then, finally, “Did you tell him I love him?”

“No.” I squeezed his hand and brought my free one up to comb my fingers through his hair and curl around his neck. “I thought you would want to do that yourself.”

“Fuck.” He shook his head and I tightened my hand on his neck, tracing my thumb over his beard at his jawline. “I feel like shit.”

“Hey,” I lifted my hand enough to turn his head toward me when he didn’t respond right away, “you didn’t do this.”

“No, but it only happened because of who I am.”

“Maybe, on this day in this exact way. But some version of it could have happened eventually no matter what.” He didn’t look convinced. I pulled my other hand from his and lifted it to mirror the first, holding his face between my hands. “And at least this way, he’s going to go to bed tonight knowing he’s safe and loved. That’s also happening because of who you are.” He nodded, but I felt the weight of his head in my hands as he let it droop, supported only by my hold. I kissed his forehead, then the top of one cheek, then the other, and finally he lifted his head just a little, brushing his nose along mine and resting there with our foreheads together, his eyes closed. “Hey, why don’t you go find something for us to watch after I get Little Man out of the tub and put him to bed.” He nodded against me. “Something happy, please, I’ve had enough heavy shit for the day.” He nodded again and pulled back, but I didn’t let him go right away. I ducked down so that I was in his line of sight and he had to make eye contact with me. “Love you.”

“Love you back.” He kissed me softly then got up and left the room.

By the time I’d changed into my own pajamas and gotten Brody out of the tub and was helping him pick out his pjs for the night, I’d made up my mind that I was not letting anyone go to sleep that night until my two boys were talking again. Part of me still felt that I needed to let - force - them to resolve it on their own, that Chris needed to get past his fear of talking to our child and that Brody needed to learn some self-advocacy, but the other part of me just wanted them both to be happy again, each secure in the knowledge of how much the other loved him. That second part was winning by far. My plan was to help Brody get into his pajamas, go get Chris while Brody chose his bedtime story, and drag my husband back with me and not let him leave the room until things were at least somewhat better again. 

“Alright buddy, what’s it gonna be tonight?” I opened the dresser drawer where Brody’s sleep clothes were stored and stood over him as he sifted through it, finally yanking out a set triumphantly. I curled my nose at the navy fabric, but inside I was thrilled. “Patriots, huh?” He nodded emphatically and I had to fight to keep the look of disgust and disappointment on my face. His determination to dig all the way to the bottom of the drawer for that particular set, especially when he’d been on a big Spiderman kick after a surprise (for him) video call from Tom Holland a couple weeks earlier, almost certainly meant that he was pulling out the stops to butter Chris up (which was wholly unnecessary, but he didn’t know that), which in turn almost certainly meant he was going to ask that Chris help tuck him in. “Are you sure?” He nodded again, his eyes going wide and making him start to look a little impatient. “Okay, fine,” I sighed dramatically, “I guess.” He grinned and pumped his fist like he’d started doing since we’d gone to Chris’s sister’s on Easter to let all the kids hunt eggs together, Chris ‘celebrating’ with a fist pump of his own every time Brody brought us an egg (which he then did one by one rather than carrying them in his basket).

I’d just laid out the offending garments on the bed when I heard Chris’s voice from the direction of our bedroom. “Baby?”

I looked at Brody over my shoulder. “You think you can handle this on your own?” He nodded proudly. “Okay, just put your robe over there on top of the toy box and I’ll hang it back up in the bathroom later When you have your pjs on, pull down the covers, choose  _ one _ ” I held up a finger, _ “ _ stuffed animal or baby, and pick your bedtime story, okay?” He nodded again, already heading for the shelf where his stuffed animal and doll collection lived. He still had the baby doll he’d had since before coming to live with us, and it had its place of honor right in the center of the pack, but the collection had grown significantly. Though we’d stocked up on kids’ stuff somewhat before he came, and a lot of gifts had been sent his way over the past couple months, we had tried not to go overboard at that time because we wanted to let him choose things of his own. So, we let him hit the toy aisle once every few Target trips, and a good 50% of the things he chose were babies or stuffed animals. I loved that he had what seemed to be a nurturing streak, and Chris certainly didn’t discourage it. “Okay, I’m just gonna go see what Chris needs."

I knew Chris’s voice had come from the direction of the bedroom, but when I got to the doorway I didn’t see him, so I headed for the bathroom. “What’s up?” I nearly gasped when I saw him. His back was to me and he was bent over the sink, but there was no doubt about what he was doing. It looked like I was going to see my husband’s face, his  _ whole  _ face, for the first time in, well, I couldn’t even remember for sure. Almost a year, I guessed, since he’d finished a short project the previous summer that had required a clean shave.

“Can you text Ma and tell her she doesn’t need to take Brody to school tomorrow?” He ran the razor under the water and tapped it on the edge of the sink, turning his head to the other side and dragging the razor across his skin. “I’m gonna take him. And, oh, hey,” he rested the razor on the edge of the sink and turned to face me, one hand curled around the edge of the vanity and the other planted on his hip, not acknowledging the nearly shocking scene I’d walked in on, “do I still have any of the Cap shirts I’ve been given for like, photo shoots and shit?”

I made my way into the room, finally. "There's one in my pj drawer.” I stopped right next to him, my back to the vanity and the mirror, and leaned back into the heels of my hands. “You shaved.”

"Yeah, well,” his voice was clipped as he turned back toward the mirror, “Captain America doesn’t have a beard. Usually.”

“Hey, c’mere.” I reached for him, curling my hand around his forearm and tugging until he sighed and moved to stand in front of me. I pushed myself up onto the countertop and pulled him forward by his shirt until he stood between my knees. “You don’t have to do all this.”

He planted his hands beside my hips and let his body weight sag. “I don’t want him to think I’m ashamed of him.”

“Oh god, Chris, he does  _ not  _ think that.”

“Maybe not consciously,” he shrugged, “not yet. But there’s a reason he didn’t scream at you that you weren’t his real mommy.”

I scoffed. “Yeah. Because I’m not Captain America and that little shit in his class doesn’t know me.”

He rolled his eyes and stood up straight again, crossing his arms over his chest. I hooked my feet lightly around his legs, right behind his knees, to keep him from trying to step away from me as he went on. “And because you pick him up from school every day, and you take him to therapy, and art class, and soccer, and you take him with you sometimes when you go to the gym,” he ticked off items on his list, lifting one finger each time, arms still folded over his chest, “where all the other instructors and trainers can see you taking him into the kids’ area. I don’t do any of that.”

Sure, I did all those things. I was practically the kid’s personal chauffeur when it came to anywhere he needed to be, and everyone at the gym where I taught two classes a week, one on Wednesday evenings and one on Saturday mornings, loved him. But we did plenty of things together, the three of us, and the two of them spent a lot of time just them, doing things like playing in our backyard or going to the quiet park nearby, where they were less likely to deal with looky-loos. I seriously doubted that Brody thought even the slightest bit about the public nature of the activities I took him to versus those he did with Chris; he just enjoyed the time they spent together. “Right, because of the inevitable circus if somebody took a picture and put it online.” And honestly, because half the time, it just made more sense for me to do those things. Why  _ wouldn’t  _ I pick him up from school, when I was on my own way home from school anyway?

Chris’s hands flew up in exasperation, and if I didn’t know him well enough after all those years to know that no matter how rattled or flustered he seemed, he was always in control, I would be afraid of accidentally getting hit. “That’s my problem, not his. And if it becomes a problem for him, it’s my job to protect him.” I flinched at the way his finger stabbed into his own chest. He wouldn’t hurt me, but I wasn’t sure he wasn’t hurting himself. “If I’m not willing to deal with that, I don’t  _ deserve  _ to get to have him call me ‘Daddy.’” I saw his jaw clench. “And I really want to deserve him.”

I was angry then, frustrated that he was being so hard on himself, so unforgiving over something that was far from being his fault. I hooked my hands into his waistband and tugged hard enough that his hips jerked and he stumbled forward until his thighs bumped the front of the vanity. “Don’t.” His eyes widened a little at my tone, one he’d heard on occasion but was never directed at him. “You know better than that. You are  _ amazing _ .” I brought my hands to his cheeks, his skin damp and smooth under my palms. “You are kind, and generous, and thoughtful, and you are a phenomenal daddy to that little boy.”

“Well, it’s time I show it.”

I wiped a streak of shaving cream from just above his lip with the pad of my thumb and before I had a chance to continue both scolding and reassuring him, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. Brody had just come to stand in the doorway, his hand fidgeting restlessly on the frame. “We’ve got company,” I told Chris quietly.

He straightened and I watched his Adam's apple bob as he swallowed once before he turned. “Hey buddy.” I heard the forced levity in his tone.

“Daddy, can you read me my story tonight?”

I could literally see the tension leave Chris’s body; his shoulders lowered, the tendons in his neck relaxed, his fingers went lax. He took a few steps forward, closing the gap between himself and Brody, and lowered to one knee. His hands went straight to curl around our boy’s narrow hips. “Nothing would make me happier, bud.”

Brody reached for Chris’s face, poking his cheeks a couple times with his index fingers then letting his hands fall to Chris’s shoulders. “What happened to your face?”

I grinned, fighting back a laugh, and Chris just shrugged. “I just shaved my beard.”

“Why?”

I did laugh then, a little, until I heard Chris’s answer. “She made me do it.” He even lifted a hand to point at me over his shoulder with his thumb. My jaw dropped and I gasped, and when he craned his head around to look at me he winked, full of mischief. 

I wasn’t surprised by how quickly his mood had changed - one night just a few weeks earlier he’d come out of his office after what I could tell had been an extremely tense phone conversation with someone in L.A., I guessed, based on the time (I hadn’t been able to make out any of the words, but more than once I’d heard his voice raise as he spoke to whoever was on the other end of the line), and headed straight upstairs. Once I’d waited so long on the couch for him that I began to wonder what he was doing, I climbed the stairs to find him in the doorway of Brody’s room watching him sleep, and when I went to his side he just tucked me under his arm wordlessly and kissed the top of my head, no hint of whatever had happened in his office still present. 

He turned back to Brody and shook his head. “She said it was too scratchy when I gave hugs and kisses.”

Brody leaned to one side to peer around him, scrutinizing me. As much as I wanted to, I didn’t say or do anything to call out Chris’s deception. Brody just looked back to Chris and shrugged. “I didn’t mind.”

Chris lifted one hand from Brody’s waist and held it between them, palm up for Brody to slap. He did, then Chris leaned back onto his heel. “Thanks for having my back. Okay, did you pick your book yet?” Brody nodded. “Awesome. Snuggle buddy?” He nodded again, rocking a little on his feet. “Good job.” Chris pushed up to his feet and brought a hand to the top of Brody’s head. “Okay,” he ruffled his hair and Brody huffed, “go climb in and I’ll be right there. Just gotta make sure I get all the shaving cream off my face. Unless I can just use your blankets to wipe it off?” His voice rose on the last sentence.

“Noooo,” Brody whined, shaking his head frantically.

Chris sighed. “Okay then, I guess I’ll do it here.”

“Okay,” Brody nodded then peered at me around Chris’s legs, “Mommy, you can come too if you want.”

I smiled softly and slid off the edge of the counter. “Sounds good, baby. Give me two minutes to brush my teeth, okay?” He nodded.

“Go ahead bud,” Chris nodded toward the door, “I’m right behind you.” Brody looked up at him for a second, and though I couldn’t see his face I was pretty sure Chris smiled as he nodded again. Satisfied, Brody left. I still thought he needed to apologize to Chris, just because it was the right thing to do and that’s what I wanted us to be teaching him, but it could wait until the morning, when at least a little bit of the trauma and hurt had been replaced by love and security. And if I’d asked Chris, he would probably have said he didn’t want the apology at all.

“Did you hear that?” I asked as soon as our little boy was gone, “I can come  _ too _ . I think you’re worrying a little too much over nothing.” Chris came to stand in front of the sink once again, turning his face side to side to inspect it in the mirror. I pulled the hand towel from the hook it hung on and used it to wipe a stray smudge of shaving cream from under the corner of his jaw, turning his head toward me with a finger under his chin to look at the other side, and he thanked me by sliding his hand under the hem of my shirt onto the small of my back and rubbing small circles there with his fingertips.

“Maybe,” he agreed once I’d finished checking him over and dropped the towel onto the counter, “but he’s still getting dropped off at school tomorrow by Steve Rogers.”

“I figured. Hey,” I fisted his shirt over his ribs and pulled myself closer to him, “tell Captain Rogers to take it easy on my husband, okay? He’s doing better than he thinks he is.”

“He’s not quite as good at this as my wife is,” he shrugged a little and hooked his fingers together behind my back, “but he’s trying.”

I wrapped my arms around him until I could rest my chin on his chest. “Brody loves you, and he’s going to be just fine.” I pushed up onto my toes to press a kiss to his lips, then his bare chin, just because. “ _ We’re  _ going to be just fine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "It is not you against this child. It is you and this child against this child's history. It is not a personal attack on you." ~Dr. Karen Purvis


	7. Hers and Mine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all! Thank you for taking this ride with me so far. The support that this story has gotten has been amazing, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. But before we go on, there’s something I have to say.
> 
> I’ve been nervous about this story from the start, for many reasons, most of which just stem from insecurity and self-doubt and I won’t get into those now. But I do feel like, all things considered, I have to address one of them. This story has been in the works - chapter outlines, big chunks of dialogue - for months. It’s been completed for weeks (many of the early chapters have been complete longer than that), as I waited to start posting until almost all the chapters were completely written so that I wouldn't be in a position to get behind on posts. I could never have predicted what is happening in the United States right now if I’d tried, and I wouldn’t have wanted to. The continued systemic (and individual) racism is this country is disgraceful and humiliating and while it shouldn't take nationwide and even worldwide protests to get that to change, and least people seem to finally be starting to take more notice. 
> 
> Still, while this story was written before the recent murders of black people by police officers or former police officers took place or were publicized, the issue of Brody’s race (his biological father’s race in particular, I suppose) made me nervous. As I tried to make clear in chapter two, I in NO WAY feel that white parents are automatically better for children of color or foreign-born children (or for any children). I know that there are many benefits to children being raised within their own cultures as much as possible, not to create division between groups of people, but because culture and history and tradition are such integral parts of who we all are as humans and we shouldn’t pretend they aren’t. (What we SHOULD do is cherish and value those things that are different and learn from them, rather than simply ignoring them or calling ourselves ‘color-blind.’) At the same time, what I do believe is that every child deserves a loving, supportive home, and sometimes it’s not possible within our current system to get both of those things at the same time.
> 
> So with all that being said, I’m trying very hard (so hard that it may at some times even come out a bit clumsy) in this story to be sensitive and respectful to all those aspects - children of color being raised by white parents can be a touchy or sensitive subject, many children in foster care just need a better situation even if it’s not the PERFECT situation from a cultural standpoint, white parents raising children of color need to respect their cultures and incorporate them into their lives - but I know I’m not perfect and that it’s very possible that I’ve made some mistakes and not handled things as well as I could. So if you are a person of color or an immigrant American or non-American reading this story and you have criticisms of how I’m handling it, please let me know. I have tried very hard to educate myself as much as possible (not just on this specific issue but on issues of race and white privilege in general over the years), but I don’t know what I don’t know. As I tried to say in the last chapter (again, probably somewhat clumsily), I know it’s not the responsibility or job of people of color to educate white people, and that’s not what I’m asking for. I’m just asking to be shown where I do need to be more educated (because again, I don’t know what I don’t know) so that I can do the work myself.
> 
> And again, thank you ALL so much for the support you’ve shown this story. It means the world to me because I was so nervous about it from the beginning for so many reasons.

_ 7 weeks later (mid June, Year 6) _

I heard Chris come in, and had it been anyone else, or even if it had still been him, just three or four years earlier, I would have frantically wiped at the tears streaming down my cheeks, maybe even gotten up and run to the bathroom to hide until I’d cleaned myself up. But I didn’t need to do that with him. I’d never  _ needed _ to, but it had taken me a while to come to terms with that, to fully accept that he wanted, accepted, and eventually  _ loved  _ all of me, that I mattered to him even when I was a mess. As it was, three years into a happy, fulfilling, beautiful marriage, I wouldn’t have even considered trying to hide anything I was feeling, however ugly. So when he stepped into the living room from the foyer, all I did was attempt to somewhat tidy up the mess around me.

“Hey babe, what’s all this?” He came closer, resting a hand on the back of my head and bending to pick up one of the pictures strewn across the coffee table. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he grinned, “I like this one.” He leaned in to kiss my cheek when he bent again to put the snapshot of Brody with his niece and nephews back onto the table, and he must have noticed my tears for the first time. He dropped the picture without bothering to pay attention to where it landed and used his fingertips under my chin and jaw to tilt my face toward him. “Whoa, what’s up?”

“Uhh,” I took a deep, shuddering breath and blew it out through my lips, “Marcus called, and …” I couldn’t seem to finish the sentence.

“Fuck.” He seemed to deflate - his hands dropped to his side, his chin tucked into his chest, and his shoulders fell. 

I reached for the hand closer to me. “No, not” I shook my head adamantly; I knew what he was thinking, because it was the same first thought I’d had when Marcus opened our conversation with  _ I’m sorry, Mrs. Evans, but I have some rather bad news.  _ But if we’d both been right, if the social worker was calling to inform us that, for reasons I could only imagine (and I had, more of them running through my mind in those seconds than I thought possible), we were losing our little boy, he’d have come home to a much, much uglier scene than me on our living room floor, pictures scattered around me and some tears streaking my cheeks. “I mean, yeah, it’s bad, it's really bad, but it’s not  _ that _ . Umm, Brody’s mom is, she’s not, she took a really bad turn.” He sighed and his eyelids fluttered closed as he shook his head slowly. He squeezed my hand for a second then pulled his free of it so he could move behind me, sitting on the edge of the couch with his feet planted on either side of my hips and his hands smoothing over my shoulders. I turned until my temple rested against his forearm. “She’s probably got about a month.”

“Oh.” He dug his thumbs into the base of my neck and bent forward to rest his chin on the top of my head lightly as he went on thoughtfully. “Oh wow, that’s, that’s terrible.”

“Mmhmm.” I nodded then lifted my shoulders high for a second as I drew in a desperate breath. “And um, I guess she called Marcus’s office, and she didn’t ask him for our contact information,” I reached out to the table again, moving the pictures around without really looking at them, just for something to do, “but she asked if he would pass along hers and ask us if maybe we would send her a picture or two, just so she can see for herself that Brody’s doing okay. You know, before -” I kind of fell apart, then. A sob pushed its way up my chest and into my throat and I pulled my knees to my chest. I wrapped my arms around my legs and dropped my forehead onto my knees. I sat like that for probably close to a minute, my shoulders heaving a little and my chest and back shaking as I cried, Chris’s hands rubbing continuous circles over my back the entire time, until I finally felt like I could speak again. “Shit,” I shook my head and cleared my throat, letting my legs slide back down in front of me. “I’m sorry.”

“Hey, stop,” he slid off the couch so that he was right behind me, his long legs boxing me in, almost enveloping me, “don’t apologize. Come here.” He pulled me back against him by my shoulders then slid his hands under my arms to wrap them around my waist. He leaned in, nuzzling his cheek against mine, his beard tickling my skin, then resting his chin on my shoulder. “Are you sad for Brody, or is it more than that?” That was a loaded question. I knew exactly why he was asking; dealing with death isn’t easy for anyone, but we had an especially tough history with it. Between the way we’d met, of course, and the unexpected loss of my grandmother during the first year of our marriage, both of which had taken major tolls on me, he had every right to be concerned about my reaction.

“I’m sad for Brody. I’m sad for her.” I leaned my head onto his, “I’m sad for the loss of a life so early, with so much more to live, so much more to potentially offer the world and that sweet little boy over at your sister’s house right now playing with his cousins and his dogs without a care in the world.” His arms tightened around me.

“And are you,” he was gentle as he pushed on, his voice soft and one hand coming up to run over my hair, tuck it behind my ear, comb the long strands over the shoulder he didn’t still rest on, “how are  _ you  _ handling it?” There was that loaded question again. Again though, I couldn’t blame him for being concerned; I couldn’t react to this impending death the way I’d reacted to the last two in my life. We had Brody and he needed me and I just couldn’t shut down the way I had when my first husband had died or upend my life the way I had when my grandmother had passed and we’d ended up spending nearly a month in Kentucky. (That second part was highly unlikely in the case of Brody’s birth mother, of course, but he was probably considering the possibilities of what new ways my anxiety and PTSD could manifest.)

“I think I’m okay.” He didn’t say anything and I shrugged, pulling away a little so I could turn just enough, still inside his bubble, to be able to look at him without craning my neck. “I mean, like I said, I’m sad. I’m really sad, the way you’re supposed to be when someone who has touched your life is going to die. But I don’t think it’s worse than that.”

The thing was, I didn’t actually know her, didn’t have a personal relationship with her. Yes, she was extremely important in my life in that she was the reason I had one of my two most important, most cherished relationships. But for as much as it would break my heart to know what the loss meant for my sweet little boy, I wasn’t personally losing anyone. I truly did think I was going to be okay. Besides, having Chris there when I’d lost my grandmother had made a huge difference, even for as hard as it still was, and having both him and Brody kind of made me feel invincible, in a way. Well, not invincible, exactly, but strong enough, supported enough, to deal with whatever I was going to have to deal with, then and in the future. Besides, being strong for and supporting others had always been my strong suit, so I felt confident I could do that for Brody; it was letting go and letting others take care of me that I had a problem with, at least until Chris had started working his way through that wall.

Chris searched my face for a few seconds and reached to free the strands of hair that had stuck to my face where I’d pressed my cheek to the side of his head. “Okay.” He finally nodded, a small movement, as he pushed the hair over my shoulder and curled his hand around my neck. “Your regular appointment is next week, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” He nodded again, apparently satisfied that almost a week wasn’t too long to wait, just in case things got worse than I expected. 

I’d found a therapist in Massachusetts before even moving, taking recommendations from different members of the Evans family and even family friends who didn’t actually know exactly who the recommendations were for, then setting up phone consultations with a few different people in the weeks leading up to the wedding. The first time I’d talked to my current therapist, a woman who had actually been recommended by Shanna’s recommendation, we’d just clicked. Her exact balance of support and empathy to tough love and even snark was just right for me. And when I told her why I was moving to the area, she only teased,  _ Oh great, celebrity drama, that’ll be new _ , which had somehow comforted me into feeling like she was going to acknowledge that my situation wasn’t exactly like everyone else’s, but also that it wasn’t going to be all about my husband’s name. At first I’d seen her once a week, filling her in on my backstory and also adjusting to all the huge changes in my life. But after about six months or so, we backed it off to every other week, only to ramp up again when my grandmother passed away. We’d managed to ease our way back down again after a couple months, though, and by Chris’s and my two-year anniversary, I was only seeing her once a month, the same frequency with which he saw his own therapist,  _ for maintenance _ , he would shrug and say. She’d known when we were planning to foster Brody, of course, and she’d promised me that she was prepared to make room in her schedule if we needed to add more sessions back in with the change and the added stress, but so far it hadn’t been necessary. I  _ hoped  _ it would stay that way. 

Chris’s eyes had gone back to the mess in front of us, and he leaned, taking me with him, to move some of the pictures around, spreading them out with his fingertips where they overlapped. “So, why don’t you tell me what we’ve got going on here. Not a picture or two, I see.” He was smirking, watching me out of the corner of his eye.

“No,” I didn’t even pretend to feel bad about it, “I thought she deserved more than that.”

“Absolutely,” he agreed. “So tell me what we’re doing.” I shifted, turning forward again and scooting back up to the table so that my folded knees fit under it. My insides warmed a little at the  _ we _ , but I didn’t react outwardly. A few times early on, and even as our relationship had progressed, I’d expressed surprise at small, sweet things he would do like that, little things that just showed his support and love and his desire to prove that we were, as he always said, a team, and each time I showed how much I hadn’t expected him to do so, it clearly offended him a little, hurt his feelings that I didn’t expect him to do exactly what he was doing. It wasn’t that I didn’t expect it from him, at all. It was just that I was so used to doing so many things on my own, taking care of everything and everyone around me. I’d always known who he was, what a kind, thoughtful person he was, but it had taken me a while to accept that that’s what I was actually getting. So I always made sure not to let him see it when, on the increasingly rare occasions those things still managed to catch me off guard, something small and sweet that he did took me by surprise.

“Umm,” I went back to what I had been doing before he’d gotten home, sifting through the many pictures, sorting and organizing them based on things like when they were taken and the activity Brody was engaged in and who else was in them, “I’m just trying to put in pictures that show who he is now, since he’s been here with us - what he loves, the kinds of things he does, school stuff.” I grinned a little, my eyes still damp but my heart starting to feel a little lighter, as I held up one of my favorites - Brody between his two best friends, a little boy and little girl in his class, on field day during the last week of school, his arms slung around each of their necks and his grin so wide his eyes were almost completely closed. Chris chuckled at the picture as he took it from my hand, taking a second to look around and figure out my system then setting it, correctly, on the top of the ‘school’ pile. “I was gonna go back and write in a short caption for each one.” I sighed, “I know she won’t get to have it for that long, but maybe it will make her smile a little more in the time she does have.”

It was quiet while we both looked through the pictures. I’d looked at them all once so far, as I was printing some and pulling others from the front of the fridge, the bulletin board over Chris’s desk, even the frame on my nightstand (I would have gotten the ones from my own desk and bulletin board, if school had still been in session), so I was focusing on trying to get them all into the right stacks so I could start deciding how to organize the actual scrapbook. Chris was seeing many of them for the first time in a while, so he was taking time to actually look at the pictures themselves, picking them up from the unorganized jumble in the middle of the table then handing them to me when he was done to put them where I wanted them.

“There aren’t any of you in here,” he finally said, once there were only a few pictures left unsorted. There were several that included him and even members of his family.

I lifted one shoulder and shook my head. “No, I just thought,” I let my voice trail off and looked down at the floor between my legs. I sighed heavily, “I don’t want to flaunt it, or rub her nose in it, you know?”

His voice came right in my ear. “And I love that about you,” he stopped, prodding at my hips until I rolled my eyes - which he couldn’t see anyway - and pushed back from the table, lifting my legs and tucking my knees into my chest so he could spin me on my butt on the hardwood floor. Once I was facing him he circled his legs around me and I lowered my own, crossing them at the ankles, so that my knees rested on his thighs. His hands smoothed down my legs and he closed them around my calves, kneading the muscles there lightly. “But did you think that maybe she would want to see that her precious little boy has a mommy who is taking good care of him and who loves him as much as she does, or damn near it, anyway, if that’s not possible?”

“You think?”

He leaned forward to kiss me quickly. “I do.” He leaned to one side, fishing his phone out of his opposite hip pocket and unlocking it without taking his other hand off my leg. I watched, upside down, as he started swiping and tapping through apps and commands. 

“What are you doing?” I leaned forward a little. 

He turned the phone toward me, a picture filling the screen. “Printing another picture for your album.”

The picture was of Brody and me one night at bedtime. Brody was tucked under the covers while I sat on top of them, my legs stretched in front of me while his head rested on my hip and his arm lay across my legs. There was a book in my hand, which I had turned toward him so he could see the pictures that accompanied the story, but his eyes were cast upward, locked on my face as I read. It wasn’t uncommon for Chris to stand in the doorway or at the foot of the bed during that little routine (and sometimes bedtime was a whole-family affair, but other times we took turns making it one-on-one time - that must have been one of my nights), but I’d never consciously noticed him taking pictures. “When did you take that?”

He smiled down at the phone. “Last week, I think. Made it my lock screen.” He pressed the button on the side of the phone to put it to sleep then tapped it to life again, showing me the lock screen as if he thought I doubted him, or maybe because he just wanted to show it off in a different context.

I reached up, closing my hand over his on the back of the phone. “I love it.” The picture, and his comments justifying the inclusion of pictures of me, jogged a memory of another picture I loved, “Hey, do you have that selfie of the three of us on the swing?”

He grinned, going back into his camera roll. “This one?” He turned the phone toward me again and there were the three of us on the big, heavy-duty swingset at the park, Chris on the swing itself, gripping the chain with one hand and the other extended out, holding the phone, me on Chris’s lap, and Brody on mine, my arms hooked around the swing’s chains and my hands clasped in front of Brody’s chest, acting as a seatbelt. I remember my face hurting when we’d gotten off the swing that day, I’d smiled so hard and for so long. At that particular moment, the three of us had worn matching grins, big and toothy and goofy. I smiled almost as wide just looking at it.

“Yeah.” I nodded. “Can you print it too?”

“Course, baby girl.” He smoothed his free hand over my hair and pulled me forward to kiss the tip of my nose before tapping the commands into his phone to send the picture to the wireless printer in his office along with the first one. He tucked his phone back into his pocket, his hands returning to their place on my calves, and jutted his chin toward the table behind me. “Now, tell me what comes next here. I’ll leave the writing to you, ‘cause we want her to be able to read it, but give me any other job.” Instead of answering him, I leaned forward, gathering his shirt in my hands over his chest to pull him toward me. I pressed my lips to his, softly at first, then pulled away for a second before kissing him again with a little more force. “Mmm,” he smiled and his tongue darted out and across his bottom lip, “what was that for?”

I just shrugged, “Because I love you.”

One eyebrow quirked up. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

His hands drifted from my calves up onto my thighs and then curled around my hips, his fingers pressing into the flesh just at the top of my butt. “Any chance you love me enough for one more of those?” I bit my lip, smirking, as I nodded, then pulled him in again, looping one arm across his shoulders and around his neck as I tugged at his shirt. I parted my lips just before they met his, and he fitted his to them instantly, a dance we’d perfected years earlier. I slipped my tongue into his mouth and let it slide over his before trading off, him pushing into the kiss and bringing his hands down to hook behind my knees and pull my legs around his waist as he chased my tongue with his, the same give and take we both sought out in every aspect of our life together. It went on like that for several long seconds, a minute, maybe, my toes tingling and my fingers reaching, flexing, searching for a way to hold him tighter, goosebumps springing up along my arms. Finally, scraping my teeth along his bottom lip, I pulled back. He pressed his forehead to mine, his breathing a little ragged. “Man, you must  _ really  _ love me.”

“You have no idea.”

His eyes closed and his head shook as he let out a quiet chuckle. “I bet I do.” He slid his hands under my shirt and up to the center of my back, his long fingers spanning my ribs, as he sat up taller to press his lips to my forehead. He rested his chin on top of my head as he dragged his hands back down and out of my shirt, tapping my butt lightly with one and bringing the other to my knee. “Okay, let’s do this. Scrapbook time.” He helped me untangle myself from him, holding me steady while I pulled my legs from around his waist and scooting back as I did. By the time I’d gotten settled at the table yet again, he was at my elbow, sitting just around the corner at the end of the table with one knee propped up and his forearm resting on it. 

We’d gone through every picture, deciding which ones were must-haves, which ones could go because they were blurry or too distant or just too similar to others, and making a back-up pile in case we needed to fill in space on a page. He’d helped me decide on an organizational strategy - “school,” “soccer,” “family,” and so on, with a chronological element to each section. He tweaked my layouts as I passed each page to him, straightening some pictures, turning others at more of an angle, and flipping some on the page altogether, always passing them back to me for final approval before gluing them down (not that it was necessary, but hey, isn’t that what teamwork is?). He’d chimed in as I wrote captions for each picture, teasing me mercilessly when I’d misspelled the word ‘occasionally.’  _ My wife, the English teacher, ladies and gentlemen _ . After nearly three hours, when all the pictures were glued down and the pages were in the right order and I’d filled in captions on about half of them, Chris reached over to pull the pen gently out of my hand, clearing his throat as he did.

“Hey, I had a thought, but if you don’t think it’s a good idea or if it makes you uncomfortable  _ at all,”  _ his hand sliced through the air over the table, _ “ _ just say the word.” He looked earnest, sweet, with his head lowered a little to look at me through his lashes and one hand resting on my knee where my leg lay bent just overlapping his, thumb drawing circles on the sensitive skin just on the inside of it. It all made me nervous.

“Okay …” I drawled, holding out the second syllable.

His thumb stilled and his hand tightened a little over my knee, his other hand finding mine on the table and closing around it. “What if we take it to her? I mean,” his eyes went wide, “if she’s okay with it. We can have Marcus ask her, then, if she says yes, he can tell us what hospital she’s in.”

My eyebrows drew together and my teeth worried at my bottom lip, both happening without my permission. “Do you think she’d want that?” My voice sounded small to my own ears. I couldn’t help it. “To meet us?” I could see both sides of it, really. On the one hand, she’d asked for pictures of what Brody was like now, proof that he was happy and healthy. Wouldn’t meeting us, talking to us, hearing and seeing the way we talked about him, the way we both lit up when we did, be that much better, go that much further toward easing her mind in her last few weeks? But on the other, we were the people who had her son. And yes, we loved him.  _ God  _ did we love him. I hesitate to say we loved him like he was our own, because I’ve never had ‘my own,’ so who am I to really say? But we both loved him as much as we could possibly imagine loving anyone, and in a different way than we’d ever loved anyone else, even our own nieces and nephews. Still, he was her son, her beautiful boy, and we had him. And while we hadn’t taken him from her, I wouldn’t blame her for seeing it that way, for feeling resentful that we had what was so rightfully hers. I wasn’t sure that she would want to actually meet us in-person.

He shrugged gently, not dismissive, just showing me he was open to my thoughts. “We can ask. But do  _ you  _ want that?”

I thought about what he was suggesting. My eyes drifted over what we’d done, all the progress we’d made. I’d put a lot of thought into it, and we’d both given an entire afternoon to making it happen. It almost seemed a waste to not at least put the option out there. Like he said, we could at least ask. And I would always feel better knowing I’d done everything I could to at least try to comfort and ease the mind of the woman who’d brought Brody into the world. “I think I’d be okay with it.”

I could see his eyes moving over my face, searching for any sign that I was holding back. When he didn’t see one, he said, “Okay,” and nodded, leaning around the corner of the table to kiss my cheek. “I’ll call Marcus when we finish up here.” His lips moved across my cheek and somewhere, in the distant back of my mind, I thought about how I’d missed his beard so much more than I’d expected to in the two weeks that he’d stayed clean-shaven after bringing back  _ Cap _ for morning drop-off - I was more than happy to be married to  _ Chris _ , I didn’t need  _ Steve Rogers _ \- and also how glad I was that it had finally grown back in all the way, full and soft again. But his forehead to my temple and his nose just in front of my ear brought me back to him, back to the present and the conversation and situation at hand. “And if you change your mind,” he told me, his voice strong and steady in my ear, “just say the word.”

I leaned my head over onto him, just a little, letting him support me. “Got it.”

…

Chris and I watched as a nurse wheeled a young woman toward where we sat in our Adirondack style chairs, the lake behind us and what looked like a sprawling family home in front of us. I’d asked him when we’d pulled up if he was sure he’d gotten the address right, and I could tell he was more than sure, and that he was a little annoyed, or probably just amused, by my asking, but he pulled up the text from Marcus with the address anyway, to appease me. We’d found out when we called Marcus back to ask him to find out if we could visit Brody’s birth mother that she wasn’t actually in a hospital. She was at a point in her cancer that there was really nothing else that could be done except make her comfortable. Sure, she could have gotten some treatment that may have allowed her to live for a few extra weeks, a couple months, even, but she would have been sick and miserable the entire time. So, knowing that it would be a rather short stay, she pulled some money out of a trust that had been left to her by her own foster parents when they passed away and checked herself into hospice care instead. Still, even knowing that we weren’t going to a traditional hospital, the beautiful facility that met us at the end of our 30-minute drive to Worcester was not what I’d expected. 

Originally, she’d intended to send the money to Brody’s foster parents if needed, knowing that the money provided by the Commonwealth should, hopefully, be enough to ensure that he was properly, if modestly, cared for. And if that wasn't necessary, as it shouldn't be, she planned to leave it to Brody when she died. It had been Marcus who’d insisted, once Brody had ended up with us, that she spend some of the money making her own last days more comfortable instead. He didn’t give her the details at the time, didn't tell her our names or our exact financial situation - partially to respect our privacy and partially because she didn’t actually want to know at first, out of fear that it would hurt too much, but he assured her that Brody was going to be just fine if there was a little less money in the account when it got passed to him. I was glad she’d made the choice that she did, and that Marcus had pushed her to do so. As he’d promised her, Brody would be more than taken care of, financially, with us. We weren’t even using the money provided by the Commonwealth, instead having the checks directly deposited into our own trust that we’d set up for Brody. It would have felt wrong, considering Chris’s financial situation, to do anything with the money other than make sure it went straight to Brody in a more direct fashion than us using it to buy groceries or school clothes that we could more than afford. No matter where things went down the road, that would be Brody’s money. And all things considered, I would much rather his birth mother spend the money on her own quality of life. (We’d actually told Marcus, but asked him not to tell her until after we’d been to see her and gone again, that we wanted him to find out just how much she was spending on the hospice facility. Chris - well,  _ we _ , but it was his money - wanted to add that amount to Brody’s trust so that ultimately, he would get what he would have gotten anyway while she received the care that she deserved to receive. And if she didn’t feel comfortable telling him, we’d do some research into the average costs for the facility and go from there, not to go against her wishes, but to make sure Brody got everything she wanted him to get.)

The woman in the chair was young, anywhere from late 20s to early 30s, it was hard to tell because of what the cancer had done to her body, and when I looked at her I saw someone who could have been one of my students at one point. She looked like she had dressed for the occasion (though maybe it was just something she did on a regular basis to make herself feel a little better) in a floral wrap dress with a matching silk scarf wrapped around her head. I could tell the dress had been hers before she’d gotten sick, or at least before she was  _ that  _ sick, because it hung far too loosely off her shoulders and there was too much extra fabric around her hips. Still, she was beautiful. She smiled up at the nurse as she talked to her while they walked, and she smiled a little wider when she saw us, both of us rising from our chairs when we made eye contact. Brody had her smile; no wonder I thought she was beautiful. When they got closer I could see that her green eyes still sparkled in the sun, and that made her even more lovely. We hadn’t even spoken yet, and I felt like I knew so much about her, felt sure that she was kind and funny and joyful, and that she brought joy to others. Maybe it was because after over 10 years of teaching I’d become a pretty good judge of character at first instinct, or maybe it was just because I so loved the little boy that she had created and I didn’t believe she could be any other way. Probably it was a little bit of both.

When they reached the edge of the circular patio that made up the outdoor sitting area, the Adirondacks around the perimeter facing a small water feature in the center, Chris closed the gap between us and them, gesturing toward the chair’s handles with one hand and raised eyebrows. Brody’s mother nodded, first at him then back up at the nurse. Chris thanked the nurse as he stepped in to take her place and reassured her that we’d make sure her patient made it back inside safe and sound when she said she’d keep an eye on us and come back out when we were finished.

He pushed the wheelchair so it was positioned just next to the chair I had been sitting in. “Hi,” I smiled down at Brody’s mother and waved a little timidly with one hand, the other hugging the scrapbook to my chest. At that moment I felt like a shy six-year-old myself. 

“Hi,” she smiled back, her body language telling me she was just as nervous as I was. “I’m Mallory,” I opened my mouth quickly, already feeling like an idiot for not introducing myself right away, but she just waved me off. “No, it’s okay, don’t feel bad,” right, I never have had a poker face, “I already know who both of you are. How could I not, right?” She grinned up at Chris then winked at me and I dropped my head, smiling and, probably, blushing. “Umm, I’m just going to apologize in advance if I’m not much of a conversationalist. I have good days and bad days, and so far this has been a good one, but I get tired easily.” She shrugged a little apologetically and looked from me over her shoulder up at Chris, “At least you came in the morning, that should help a little.”

“No, please, don’t worry about it at all.” I kept my eyes on her as I spoke, but out of my periphery I saw Chris bend to set the locks on the wheels of her chair then cross behind us both to perch on the opposite arm of my chair, and I took that as my cue to sit as well. “And we don’t want to overstay our welcome, we just wanted to give you this in person.” I’d set the book on my lap when I sat down, so I pushed it forward a little until it reached my knees, smoothing my hands over the top. 

She shook her head and waved one hand a little, just a flick of the wrist, really, “I’m so glad you’re here. And I hope it didn’t cause you guys any inconvenience asking that you not bring Brody.” I shook my head, maybe a little too hard, because Chris’s hand came up to curl around the back of my neck under my hair, his thumb rubbing circles along my hairline. “It’s just,” she lifted one shoulder, “our last day together was so nice. I was still healthy enough to play with him and read to him and he was happy. I don’t want to take that away.”

“Hey, no, we totally understand that,” Chris promised. “He’s with my mom. She loves having him.”

I didn’t know what else to say without drawing attention to the underlying meaning behind what she’d just said, so I cleared my throat and started, awkwardly, “Um, Marcus said you wanted pictures.” I lifted the book then, holding it out so that she could take it, or so that I could lay it on her lap if she couldn’t lift it herself.

She pulled it gingerly from my hands but I let them hover until she had it resting on her legs. “This is a book.” She sounded a little bit in awe, not at all sarcastic.

“Yeah,” I rolled my eyes at myself and leaned toward Chris until I could nudge his leg with my elbow, “he tells me I get carried away. I just wanted you to have more than one or two pictures, so those are some that we thought kind of capture what his life is like now.” She opened the scrapbook then, and I leaned over to point at the first page, “I um, I wrote in some little notes about each one.”

We were all quiet as she flipped through the first few pages, then she went back to the beginning, “Could you maybe just, tell me about them, about  _ him _ ? If you’re not in a hurry,” she added quickly.

“Yeah, of course,” I almost blurted out. I was maybe a little too eager with my response, but Chris spoke at the same time, so at least I wasn’t alone.

“We’ve got nowhere to be.”

She just nodded then and looked back down at the page in front of her, listening as I started telling her about each of the pictures there, Chris chiming in at least once or twice per picture to make sure she was getting the whole story.

“He always wanted a dog,” she told us at around page four or five, looking at a picture of Brody with both dogs in our backyard, Dodger pulling on the opposite end of a tug toy that he held and Millie ‘helping’ by desperately licking at his hands and arms, “but I just couldn’t, with my work schedule.”

I couldn’t help but grin as I leaned in a little to tap my index finger on the picture. “The tan one is Dodger and the black one is Millie. She used to be terrified of kids, but she never leaves his side.” 

Several minutes later we’d gotten to the portion of the book devoted to his activities and hobbies - school, soccer, art. “He looks so proud.”

“Oh my gosh, he was,” I confirmed, my eyes wide as I nodded, looking down at the picture of Brody standing on our front porch just as we got home from art class, holding up his newest creation under his chin with both hands. He’d started insisting I take the photo before I even got him out of the car. I’d tried to convince him we could do it inside, but he said it would be more artistic on the porch. What made that so, or where he’d even gotten an idea like that, I had no idea, but I didn’t argue with him over it. “It spent a week on the fridge then he made us hang it over his bed.”

“And it’s still there,” Chris chimed in.

She leaned down a little, squinting at the page. “What is it?”

While I was still trying to formulate an answer, Chris beat me to the punch. “We have  _ no  _ idea.” His hand left its resting place on my neck and I looked up to find him shaking his head, bottom lip pushed out a little and both hands up next to his face in a  _ don’t look at me _ gesture. I rolled my eyes at him before letting them fall closed as I shook my head, and Mallory only laughed, the sound quiet and a little hollow in her chest. 

Finally we got to the last page, the end of what we’d deemed the ‘quiet family moments’ section when we were working together on our living room floor, and I felt myself starting to tense, my knee bouncing and unfriendly butterflies awakening in my stomach. Chris’s hand, which he’d dropped to the back of my chair after his little display earlier, found my shoulder, and he brought the other up from his lap to do the same on the side closer to him. I felt more of his weight on me as he leaned in, squeezing and pressing a little on my shoulders and letting his weight press me down into the chair. “I’m sorry,” I told her, tucking my hands under my thighs so she wouldn’t see them shaking. The last page was only two pictures, the swingset selfie and the one Chris had snuck of Brody and me at bedtime. “I didn’t know if I should include those.”

She was quiet at first, and Chris continued the small movements of his hands up and down over my shoulders while her fingertips drifted lightly over the pictures on the page. “I love them.” She didn’t look up, but the sincerity in her voice was clear. “You really love him, both of you.” She wasn’t asking. She went quiet again for a few seconds, then looked up at us. No, actually, at me, direct, piercing, honest and earnest eye contact. “He loves you.” My heart jumped into my throat. “I know that face.” Though her eyes stayed locked on mine, her fingers still moved over the picture of the two of us.

I attempted to swallow down the lump in my throat. “He’s amazing.” My voice cracked on the last syllable and Chris pushed away from me until he could lean down to kiss the top of my head before picking up where I couldn’t go on.

“I know we’re not perfect, and I know we mess up sometimes, me way more than her,” his hands slid across the top of my chest until they reached the opposite shoulders and he pulled me back, hugging me to the side of his leg as he told the blatant lie that he wasn’t an absolutely perfect father, or that I was in any way better than him - it was every bit a joint effort - “but we do love him and we do our best for him every day.”

She smiled and I could see the tears in her eyes, and if the waiver in Chris’s voice was any indication, we were just on the verge of being one big mess of tears, all three of us. “I can tell,” she nodded. We stayed quiet for a few moments, each of us undoubtedly trying to pull ourselves back together. Eventually, she closed the scrapbook and stood it up on her legs to hug it to her stomach. “I wanted to ask you one more thing, since you’re here.”

I nodded enthusiastically, but Chris was the one who actually responded. “Sure, anything.”

“Well,” her eyes went wide and she tilted her head a little, “you may want to hear what it is before you say that.” I felt Chris’s hands tighten on my shoulders, but neither of us said anything, waiting. “Have you two ever thought about,” she trailed off for a second and I felt like I might explode, “adopting him?” My mouth flew open and I snapped it closed just as quickly, and I felt Chris shifting behind me. “You don’t have to say yes or no right now,” she added quickly. “In fact, I don’t want you to. I want you to leave here and talk about it completely openly, where you don’t have to worry about my feelings. It’s just, before I even met you,” she sighed and kind of rolled her eyes, “well, Marcus checks in with me even though he doesn’t really have to, and he kept telling me how good you are to Brody, and  _ for _ him, and how convinced he was that you really love him, and now that I’ve met you,” she stopped just long enough to smile and shrug, “well, I had to ask. While I still can.”

Chris’s right hand loosened its grip on my left shoulder and slid down and over a few inches to rest just over my pounding heart. “We’ll definitely talk about it,” he told her. I was still too breathless to say anything.

She nodded again, looking a little uncomfortable, no doubt thanks to the magnitude of what she’d just asked and the way it had completely charged the air between the three of us. “Just have Marcus call me?” I nodded, and I was sure Chris probably did the same thing. “When you decide, one way or the other.”

I finally found my voice. “We will. And um, can we,  _ I, _ _ , _ ask you one thing,” I looked up at Chris and he looked back down at me a little quizzically. I hadn’t discussed the next part with him, but then, we hadn’t expected to be asked to adopt Brody either, so all bets were kind of off, “something kind of personal?”

To add to my reasons to admire her, Mallory only sniled and scoffed. “I just asked you to adopt my son, what could be more personal than that? Go ahead.” I felt bad then, because she reached over and rested her hand on mine where it sat on the chair’s armrest and the last thing on earth she should feel like she needed to do at that moment was comfort me.

“Umm,” I frowned and wrinkled my forehead, “Brody’s name, it’s very …”

“White?” she chimed in.

I flinched. God, it sounded so bad like that. “Yeah, actually. Sorry.”

“No,” she practically giggled then, and I looked up at Chris to find him smirking down at me like he thought I was ridiculous, but also like he wasn’t upset about it, “it’s okay, it  _ is  _ an odd combination, I know. His last name was his father’s of course. It would have been mine too, eventually, if his father hadn’t died. Carlos and I always planned to get married, but he wanted to wait.” She said it like she was perfectly comfortable with their story, not like she was apologizing or had something to explain or answer for, which made me glad for her that she’d had a love that made her feel that way, even if it was cut far too short. “He was a Dreamer, his immigration status, I mean, and he insisted that we wait until he was fully documented on his own. I never once thought that’s why he was with me, but he said it was important to him, and I didn’t  _ need  _ to get married to feel confident in our relationship, so I didn’t mind waiting.” She smiled and fingered a small charm on a chain around her neck that I hadn’t noticed before. I couldn’t actually tell what it was supposed to be, but then, I guessed that wasn’t at all the point, it wasn’t there for me. 

She went on, “Carlos was also the one who didn’t want Brody to have a traditionally Latin name. We’d already decided he was going to have his father’s last name, and he was most likely going to look Latino, Carlos said that was enough.” For the first time, she started to look a little apologetic, maybe sad. “He was skeptical about racism and thought giving his son a ‘white-sounding’ name might make things easier for him with other kids and on things like job and college applications.” I sighed then, involuntarily, wishing I could contradict that suspicion but knowing any contradiction would be a lie, and I felt Chris tense for just a second, undoubtedly thinking about the turmoil that same racism had already caused in our little family, and probably forcing himself to relax for her benefit. “So for his first name, well, it sounds European and I thought it was pretty, it’s really as simple as that.” She grinned as she lifted one shoulder. I certainly wouldn’t argue with her on that one. “And Carlos’s entire family was very Catholic. His parents believed Saint Christopher brought them to the U.S. safely from Costa Rica when he was a child.” I felt myself smiling as I thought of the pendant that always hung from Chris’s neck. “So, Brody Christopher Vargas.” She looked down into her lap and picked a little at one corner of the scrapbook. “You could, umm, you can change it if you want. If you adopt him.”

Chris jumped in almost abruptly, “We wouldn’t dream of it.”

“It’s a perfect name for him,” I said as soon as he finished.  _ It’s a perfect name for our little boy _ , I thought, as I’d thought from the very beginning, but I didn’t say it out loud, would never say it out loud, not to her. 

I watched a million emotions move across her face and I could only imagine what she was thinking. Was she remembering the moment she found out she was pregnant? The moment they found out he was a  _ he _ , then deciding on that very perfect name? Bringing him home from the hospital, their beautiful little family of three? I loved that little boy she’d created more than anything in the world - well, probably exactly as much as I loved Chris, in a totally different way - and my heart nearly stopped every time I remembered that there was a chance he’d be taken from us some day. But none of that changed the fact that, at that moment, I wanted nothing more than to make her healthy, make her okay again, just so she could have her perfect little boy back and be his Mommy again. That wouldn’t happen, though. I couldn’t fix her. But I could keep loving her little boy, keep making sure he was happy and healthy and had a home where he was safe and knew he belonged. 

“Maybe just,” she started again, once her face had settled and her emotions seemed to have calmed, “if you do adopt him, add your last name? Hyphenate it, maybe, or make Vargas a second middle name?” She was watching us, gauging our reactions, I think, because she’d started out quietly, timidly, but she became much more confident as she went on and neither of us seemed to balk at the idea. “It feels right, to me, for him to have his parents’ last name.”

Chris had to know there was no way that I could respond gracefully to that, there’s nothing that would have come out of my mouth that wouldn’t have ended in tears. So he pressed his hand a little more firmly against my heart and closed the other hand a little more tightly over my opposite shoulder, and he answered for the both of us. “We’ll definitely add that to the list of things we’re going to talk about.”

We’d only stayed another 10 minutes or so. Mallory was clearly wearing down, either because her body had had enough for the day or because she’d done what she needed to do, or maybe a combination of both. I was emotionally drained, and if pressed, I would say that Chris probably was too. So we made some small talk, wrapped things up, and wheeled Mallory back into the common room of the hospice house, where the same nurse from before met us to take her to her room.

Neither of us spoke for the first five minutes or so of the drive. I pretended it was because I didn’t want to distract Chris as he navigated us back to the highway, but we both knew that was unnecessary. Finally, when he looked over at me at a stoplight, his fingers tightening around mine where we held hands over the console, I sighed and told him, “My heart is a little broken right now.”

“I know baby, me too,” he said, voice low and soothing, as he lifted our hands to his lips. He pressed a kiss to the back of my hand, then just kind of held it there as he drove, easing his foot onto the gas as the light turned green. 

“I’m glad we came,” I added, because it was true, but also because I didn’t want him to worry about me. My heart  _ was  _ broken, but it felt like it was appropriately broken, broken in the right way, if such a thing is possible.

“So am I.”

I shifted in my seat, pulling my left leg up and under me and turning so that my back was mostly to the door and I was turned as squarely to him as possible while staying buckled into the seat. “What do you think?” I nearly blurted out, unable to wait any longer. “About what she asked.”

“Honestly?” His eyes darted over to me then back to the road quickly. 

“Always.”

He sighed and let our hands fall back to the console. “I’ve been feeling like shit for weeks now, because of course I don’t wish ill on her, I’d love more than anything to see her healthy, but the thought of losing Brody, for any reason, makes me want to,” he stopped for a second and clenched my hand in his, his jaw ticking, “I don’t know, break shit.”

I actually laughed at that, just a little, because _thank god._ “Me too. I actually talked to my therapist about it yesterday.”

“Oh yeah?” He smirked, but I could see a certain amount of seriousness under it. “What did she say? Are we evil dirt bags?”

“No, we just love him so much that the thought of losing him makes us think a little desperately.” I brought my other hand across to rest on top of the two that were still joined, tracing lines up and down through the hair on his forearm. “Chris?” I started again after a few seconds.

“Yeah baby?” 

“We’re going to say yes, right?” I knew the answer, or at least I was nearly certain I did, but I needed to hear him say it.

He stepped on the brakes much harder than necessary for the stop light that was still several seconds ahead of us, at least, and looked over at me with a look of complete incredulity, bordering on annoyance or frustration that I would even ask. “Oh, one-hundred-fucking-percent.”

“Okay,” I relaxed into the seat, smiling as my head fell sideways onto the headrest, my eyes never leaving his face, "just making sure.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "He is mine in a way that he will never be hers, he is hers in a way that he will never be mine, and together we are motherhood." ~ Desha Wood


	8. Biology

_2 weeks later (early July, Year 6)_

I’d been staring at the phone for a good five minutes, if not longer. I’d told myself I would make the call once Chris and Brody were out of the house and I had some peace and quiet, but they’d been gone for over two hours and I’d only gotten as far as clearing the lunch dishes, ushering the dogs out the back door, and sitting in the middle of the couch, my hands gripping the phone between my nearly trembling knees. I knew I didn’t have much time; Brody played _hard_ , and a couple hours was usually his limit at the park before he wore himself down to the point of exhaustion. Throw in the July heat, and Chris would be bringing him home - carrying him in, probably - any minute. I pulled in a deep breath and held it as I placed the call, my eyes squeezed shut and my thumb and forefinger pinching the bridge of my nose. I prayed it would go unanswered. No such luck. “Hello?” 

“Hey.” I forced my voice to be more positive than I actually felt.

“Well. Look who bothers to call. Let me guess, you’re walking the dogs.”

My lungs and chest deflated forcefully, pushing all the air they'd held harshly past my lips. She could probably hear it, but I didn’t really care anymore. I’d tried. “Nope, just sitting here on the couch. I wanted to tell you, umm, I have news.” I bit the inside of my cheek and shook my head at myself. I was being stupid; I was a 40-year-old woman, what was she going to do? And from 1,000 miles away, no less. I spit the words out in one breath. “You’re, well, you’re going to be a grandma again. Legally.”

There was silence for a second, an extremely rare occurrence on the phone with my mother, then, completely devoid of emotion, “You’re pregnant?”

I, on the other hand, had plenty of emotion, all of it somewhere in the family of shock. “What? I’m,” obviously she couldn’t see me, but I let my mouth gape open and squinted, lowering my eyebrows and shaking my head in disbelief. “No, mom. I’m not pregnant.”

“Oh,” still, that lack of emotion. “Well then you’re not making any sense.”

I smacked my forehead with the hand not holding the phone to my ear. “Brody, mom, we’re adopting Brody.” There was no response. “The amazing little boy we’ve been fostering since March?” I could feel my neck and chest growing hot. No, we weren’t exactly close. We didn’t talk daily, or even weekly, and I certainly didn’t rely on her and involve her in my life the way my brother did, or even the way I’d done when I was younger, when I was still so desperate to make her happy and before I realized how toxic she was to me. But we’d certainly talked enough since March for her to know who Brody was. I’d even sent her a few pictures, here and there - him with his Easter basket, then out on the lake for Memorial day, and, most recently, his face lit by sparklers the past weekend at the Evans family 4th of July party. None of the pictures I sent ever had Chris, or even me, in them - I didn’t trust her with those - but while I never expected her to be actively involved, I was trying not to cut her out either, if for no other reason than to make sure she couldn’t accuse me of doing so (and, probably, because some part of me, deep down, wanted her to be the mom I deserved, and, by that point, the grandma Brody deserved, and thought that someday she might get there if I kept giving her the opportunity to do so).

“I know who Brody is,” she finally snapped at me. “Obviously. I just think the whole thing is odd, that’s all. I mean, you refused to have kids when you were married, but-”

I snapped back, then, cutting her off. “I’m married now.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do. And that doesn’t change what I said.” I tried not to engage with her when she started with things like that. I knew she was baiting me and that I would be the only one to suffer in the long run. And with a lot of strategies from my therapist, I was usually successful at not taking the bait. But god, it had been hard enough listening to her mention Chris as if he were somehow ‘less than,’ or, I don’t know, not a legitimate partner for me, for the past four years. I didn’t see how I would be able to continue keeping my cool with Brody being a part of that conversation.

“Well.” Her tone said I was being irrational. “Anyway. You wouldn’t have kids with your first husband, but now you will, why? Because you married a movie star, someone who has a lot of fame and money? You think that’s all it takes to be a parent?” I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and clamped my jaw so tightly shut that I worried for the safety of my molars. I couldn't believe she was trying to lecture me on parenting. She kept talking and I stood to pace around the coffee table, my hand fisting in my hair at the top of my head. “Or are you two having problems already? This won’t fix it, you know.”

I almost yelled then. “I,” I stopped walking and my chest heaved with what were supposed to be calming breaths. “No.” I forced my volume back to an acceptable level, but even I could hear the venom in my voice. I took another couple breaths, hoping to at least make myself sound like a rational human being. “I am very, very happy. We both are. We make each other happy, and Brody makes us happy.”

As if on cue, Brody’s voice rang through the air. “Mommy!” I spun on my heel toward the open, wide doorway that led to the foyer, where my two best boys stood looking back at me. I must have been a terrible sight, with my face and neck flushed with anger and my eyes starting to well with tears. Brody looked up at Chris, whose face said he knew exactly what was happening. I’d told him before he left that I planned to make the call, and he’d asked if I wanted him to stay home instead, and just send Brody to his room to play for a while, or even to Chris's sister’s for the afternoon, but I’d told him no. I needed to be a big girl, I said, and it was important to me that we not ‘ditch’ Brody, even if he didn’t know he was being ditched, for me to make that particular call. Turns out it didn’t matter though, because I was such a baby that I’d wasted all my alone time dreading the call. “Daddy,” my sweet, perceptive boy started quietly, “why is Mommy sad?’ 

“Hey Bud,” Chris moved his hand from where it had rested on the back of Brody’s shoulder to the top of his head, “I think I heard Bubba and Millie Moo out back when we were coming in, why don’t you go join them? Me and Mommy will be out in a few minutes.”

Brody frowned, “But I wanted to show her,” he looked at me out of the corner of his eye then beckoned with one finger for Chris to come down to his height; he did, squatting and resting his forearms on his thighs, and Brody spoke in what was supposed to be a whisper, “wanted to show her my surprise.”

Chris grinned and shifted his eyes over to me, and already I could feel my face softening. I hadn’t actually been sad before - I’d been very angry - but I was quickly getting that way. How could I not, when I was looking right at what my own mother was so desperately trying to ruin for me (and wondering _how_ she could do so, now that I’d started to understand what it felt like to be a mom)? “I know, Bud. And you will, I promise.”

Brody stepped between Chris's knees and leaned in to speak into his ear, but it was the ear closer to me, and he still wasn’t whispering, so I caught every word. “Maybe it will make her not be sad anymore.” My heart physically hurt at that, and I wiggled my fingers at my boys then turned away from them so Brody wouldn’t see as the tears spilled over.

“Oh, it’ll totally do that. Now go on, we’ll be out soon.” 

I heard Brody’s pounding, hurried footsteps until he was out the back door, and he wasn’t supposed to be running in the house, but I certainly wasn’t going to say anything about it at the moment. Meanwhile, my mother had kept talking the whole time that I was watching Chris and Brody, and I finally turned my attention back to the phone. “I just find it odd that you wouldn’t give your first husband kids, but now you’ll take someone else’s kid as your own.”

I felt Chris’s hands on my hips and his lips on the back of my head, and I pulled the phone away from my ear to put it on speaker. “He didn’t want to have kids.” I reminded her. “He never wanted to have kids. You know that, everyone knows that. It wasn’t really something I wanted either, then. My medical situation just, just solidified it.”

“So you’re letting your big shot husband make you change your whole life and what you want.” My _big shot husband_ scoffed behind me, and I could feel his breath part my hair.

“No, it’s different now,” I ground out. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t told her, the very first time I told her about Brody at all, that fostering him had been my idea and that I’d asked Chris if it was something we could do. But I shouldn’t have expected her to take something like that into account. “My relationship with him is different, my marriage to him is different, _our life_ , is different.” His thumbs drifted across my skin through my shirt, just above my hip bones, and I felt his chin come to rest on the top of my head. “I was perfectly happy before, in my previous relationship, my previous life, without having kids of my own. And I could probably continue to be content that way. But I also think, in _this_ life, with Chris as my partner, I’ll be really happy as a mom, too.” He slid his hands across my waist until his arms wrapped around me, pulling me back against him, and while I still held the phone out in front of me with my right hand, I reached back with the left from where it had been rubbing at my forehead to curl over the back of his neck.

“Well if that’s the case, why don’t you have your own, why take someone else’s?”

That same hand that had just settled on Chris’s neck, fingertips tracing circles over his skin as a way to both ground and distract myself, flew up into the air in exasperation then fell to my side. I rolled my eyes until it hurt, and I felt Chris shaking his head. “Because I _can’t._ You know this, you’ve known it for 15 years.”

“They didn’t say you definitely can’t.”

“No, they just said I definitely shouldn’t.”

“You could try, at least.” Chris’s hands clenched then, fingertips sinking into the flesh of my hips, and I felt him tense and straighten behind me. His chest, rising and falling a little raggedly, pressed against my back as he rose to his full height, towering over me protectively. I only dropped my head until my chin hit my chest.

“And what,” the fire was gone at that point and I was just tired - tired of explaining myself to her, the same things over and over again, tired of defending my choices and my life, tired of her acting like reality was something it wasn’t, tired of all of it - and I’m sure it played out in my voice, “have one miscarriage after another? Put myself at risk of bleeding to death internally if I don’t miscarry?” Chris’s fingertips eased their grip on my hips so his arms could tighten around me, hands curling even farther around my waist until his fingertips rested at the top of my butt and pulling my whole body flush against him, and I lifted my free hand from where it hung at my side to curl around his opposite bicep where it crossed over the front of my body.

“You don’t have to be so dramatic.” My head couldn’t fall any farther forward, so I lifted it and dropped it back until it hit Chris’s shoulder. He turned and pressed a kiss to my temple. I didn’t have a good response to my mother’s accusation, so I said nothing until she finally went on. “Fine, why not get a surrogate then? At least it would be _yours_ that way. Unless you’re actually trying to avoid passing on our genes. I guess they’re not good enough for you two.”

I stepped away from Chris then, his hands dragging across my waist a little reluctantly as I did, not because I didn’t love being held by him, but because I just needed space to move, a release valve for some of the tension that only kept building, or I might actually explode. “Mom, that’s not,” I stopped after only a couple steps and turned back to face him, my hand on my hip and an _are you getting all this?_ expression on my face, the irony of the facts that, first, I’d been raised, for a while anyway, by a man with whom I shared no genes, and second, I had never even been told my biological father’s name, flashing like a neon sign in my brain, “why the obsession with biology? Brody _is_ ours,” I took in the way Chris looked back at me when I said that, the love in his eyes and and his soft almost-smile holding so many promises, and for a second it didn’t matter that I was talking to her, and that she was doing anything she could to dampen my happiness, because what I’d said was true and I didn’t need anything else, and my voice came out much calmer, much softer than before, “as much as any child ever would be, regardless of genetics. We love him and he loves us and he’s just, he’s _ours_.” Even though I’d just stepped away from him to give myself some space to breathe and move, I held out both arms, completely ignoring the fact that I was still holding the phone and not really caring if I muffled the call, and waited for Chris to step into them so I could wrap them around his waist. One of his hands curled around the back of my head, cradling it to his chest, and the other skimmed over my spine.

“His actual mother might have something to say about that, one day. Have you considered that?”

I sagged against Chris and he held me tighter to him for a second, then I rested my hands on his hips, careful not to hang up the call (while at the same time thinking it might not be the worst thing if I did), and pushed myself away from him. “No, actually,” I sighed, “because his biological mother, who is a kind, loving woman who wants her son to have a good life, asked us a couple weeks ago if we would consider adopting him. She’s not going to live much longer and she wants to make sure he’s going to be taken care of. She knows we love him, and she knows he’ll have everything he’ll ever need as long as he’s with us.” I watched Chris watching me, and his little nod gave me the confidence to push a little harder than usual, pacing again as I went on. “Look, I wasn’t telling you this because I expected anything from you. I thought you might be happy to know you were going to officially have another grandchild, but if you’re not, that’s okay too. Maybe one day you’ll realize what you’re missing out on with Brody, with me, even with Chris.” I turned from where I’d found myself on the opposite side of the coffee table and looked at him. My throat tightened and my voice wavered, “Because you’re missing so, so much with those two.” I took a deep breath, because I didn’t want my voice to shake on the next part, didn’t want to give her any reason to doubt or question or contradict what I was about to say. “You’re my mother, and I’m never going to push you out of my life, but I’m not going to beg you to be a part of it either, especially if you are going to mistreat and look down on the two people I love most in this world.”

“Look, I never,” she started, but I barely heard her, because I was again focused on my husband, who continued to watch me closely, one arm across his chest while the other elbow rested on his wrist and his hand reached up so that his thumb could drift back and forth over his lips, his brow furrowed in concern. I somehow hadn’t really noticed that before; I’d seen the love, felt the support, picked up on the annoyance and frustration, but I’d missed the worry that was etched deep into his face. I hated that he was so prepared for me to fall apart every time I talked to her, always ready and willing to put me back together, not because I found it offensive or insulting, but because _god,_ it shouldn’t have to be that way. 

I’d said versions of what I was about to say before, and while I always thought I meant it, I also always held out a sliver of hope that things would change, that _she_ would change. But with Chris looking at me like that, and with Brody, well, with him simply being in my life, I was done. Somehow, even before I said it, I could feel that it was different, that whatever string had been holding me to her in the past, however tenuously, had just snapped.

“And now I have to go,” I cut her off, “because I have a husband who’s worried about me and a son who’s in the backyard playing with his dogs and waiting to show me a surprise. If you decide you’re ready to be more respectful of those two things, you can call me. And if not, well, that’s on you. I can’t do this anymore. Goodbye, I love you.” Before I could lose my nerve, I tapped the little red icon to end the call and tossed the phone onto the couch. I was suddenly completely and utterly drained.

“C’mere.” Chris reached for me and grabbed my hands as soon as I was close enough, meeting me somewhere between the couch and the table. He pulled my arms around his waist, sliding his hands upward once I settled mine on his hips until they were smoothing over my shoulders repetitively, soothingly. I could feel it in his touch and I could hear it in his voice - he saw the tether snap as well.

“I don’t know what I expected.” I gathered the fabric of his shirt in my hands as I tried my best to hold him tighter.

He kissed the top of my head and his lips moved across my hair as he spoke. “You expected her to be happy for you, like a grandma-to-be should be.” He turned to rest his cheek on my head.

I shook my head, my forehead rocking against his chest. “But I should have known. It was like this when I stayed in Virginia after the funeral, when I told her you and I were dating, when we got engaged. I should have known it would be like this now. But I just keep _hoping_.” I tensed, pulling a little harder on his shirt. “God, I feel so stupid.”

He pushed me gently away from him and brought his hands up, brushing my hair away from my face with the backs of his fingers and tucking it behind my ears then cupping both cheeks in his hands. “Oh, my sweet girl, you are _not_ the stupid one here.” He pressed his forehead to mine.

I sniffled and his thumbs wiped at the tears that leaked slowly from my eyes. I went on without acknowledging what he’d said. “And I’ve been a terrible wife, and a terrible girlfriend before that, for that matter. I just, I had to make it stop, before I became a terrible mom, too.”

Still holding me in place, he pulled back a little more, squinting at me. “What the hell are you talking about?”

I wrapped my hands around his wrists and pulled slightly, just for a second, but it was instantly clear that he wasn’t going to let me go, so I just let them rest there instead, “She’s never treated you properly, never shown you the respect you deserve as my partner, or as a human, for that matter.” I closed my eyes and ground my teeth together. “And I just, let it happen, all this time.”

“Look at me,” he instructed gently, waiting until I did as he asked before going on. “You don’t control her actions,” he shook his head slowly, “or her words.”

“No, but I didn’t have to put up with it, I could’ve, I could have just cut it all off, a long time ago.” I could only drop my head so far with him still holding me, but my eyes went to the floor. “Every time I talked to her, ever since that first time I told her about you, I’d tell her I wouldn’t stand for the way she dismissed you, dismissed _us_ , then, a week or two later, there I was talking to her again. I should have just cut ties then.”

“She’s your mom. I would never ask you to do that, wouldn’t expect you to,” he shook his head, at the same time lowering it to put himself back in my eyeline. “And, hey,” he stopped when he realized I’d closed my eyes rather than look him in his, “ _look_ at me,” he shifted his hands, sliding his thumbs under my chin to tilt my head up toward him, and I forced my eyes open, “you’re the one who’s suffered from this, not me. You’ve always borne the brunt of it all, baby. I’ve never had to listen to a single bad word, never been part of a single ugly conversation with her. You’ve never once even asked me to go spend time with her, or any of your family, even though you can’t escape mine if you try.” He lifted one eyebrow and I knew he was trying to joke, and somewhere deep in my chest a tiny giggle started to build. He kissed me, just beside the outer corner of my left eye, and went on, “Aside from bringing Haleigh here last summer, which was awesome, each of the few times I’ve been around any of them have been _my_ idea." It really had been awesome, and I still hadn’t stopped telling him how much I appreciated that he’d agreed so quickly to let my niece come spend a month with us. "You’re the one who has to deal with all the bullshit, not me. So yeah,” Chris continued and I watched his jaw tick, just once, “I get _pissed_ when I see how they hurt you, and I’m glad you stood up for yourself just now, but I don’t blame you for still trying with her.”

I slid my hands from his wrists up onto the backs of his hands, and he finally let me pull them away from my face. I slotted my fingers between his and brought our hands to my chest, tucking my head under his chin and pressing my lips to his neck. “I love you,” I murmured into his skin.

“I love you back,” he said against my temple. “And you’re an amazing wife, for the record.” He kissed me again. “And a fucking _awesome_ mom.” I sighed then, and pulled back a little to smile up at him in appreciation. “And any time you feel like _you_ need to be mommed, you know Lisa Evans is more than happy to step up to the plate.” He winked then, and that tiny little giggle from before pushed its way up through my throat and quietly past my lips. He grinned, proud of himself, and pulled his hands free to press them into the small of my back as he leaned down to really kiss me, moving his lips slowly and carefully over mine. 

When he pulled back, after a final sweet kiss to my cheek, I turned my head and rested it on his chest. “Thank you, for all of this, like always.”

My head moved with his chest as he made a sound that sounded like something between a laugh and a scoff. “You’re gonna get tired’a thanking me, one day. You’re my wife, my partner.” One of his hands came up to slide under my hair at the back of my neck while the other closed into a loose fist and he ran his knuckles up and down over my spine. “This is what we do.” Both arms wrapped around my shoulders, hugging me tight for a moment, then, with one arm still around me but sliding down until his hand settled just above my hipbone and the other hand dropping to slip into his pocket, he turned me and tucked me into his side. “So,” he tilted his head to look down at me, cute little lopsided grin taking up half his face. “You ready to go join the Wild Things in the backyard? I _believe_ there’s a little boy out there with a surprise for his mom.”

“Yes,” I sighed, dropping my head over onto his shoulder and winding my arms around his waist. “Please.”

I let him guide me around the couch and through the dining room, and once we’d made it to the kitchen, just beside the island where the jar of peanut butter from Brody’s lunch still sat, missed in the midst of my distraction and anxiety when I’d cleaned up before, he leaned down right next to my ear and said, “Spoiler alert, it’s a rock.”

I gasped and smacked his stomach. “Chris!”

“What?” His hand lifted off my waist just a little and he looked at me with wide eyes, feigning innocence, “Just trying to manage expectations here, babe. Don’t want you expecting like, jewelry or something.”

I rolled my eyes. “He’s six. Of course I wasn’t expecting jewelry.” I let the hand I’d smacked him with settle back onto his hip, digging my fingers into what I knew was a ticklish spot for just a fraction of a second, “I can’t believe you ruined his surprise.”

“I mean, it’s a really cool rock.”

I shook my head. “Stop talking.”

He completely ignored me. “Sparkly,” he quipped. “I guess you could _make_ jewelry out of it.” He stopped us just inside the back door and we both looked out at Brody, who, clearly exhausted but refusing to give up playing with his pups, was laying on his stomach across the tire swing Chris had hung from the tall elm tree in the backyard, holding a long, knotted rope that the dogs took turns running after and grabbing as the swing took Brody back and forth and in wide circles, letting the dogs and the pendulum motion of the swing do all the work for him. 

I just watched for a few seconds, probably long enough for Chris to think I was going to drop it. Then, without looking at him, “I’m gonna tell him you ruined his surprise.”

The big jerk had the nerve to actually _snort_ at me. “No you’re not.” I looked up with raised eyebrows and a _just watch me_ set to my jaw. “Because,” he went on, “then you wouldn’t be able to fake being surprised so you can watch his face light up when he sees how happy he made you.” He was completely right, and I deflated immediately, my shoulders falling and the challenge on my face transitioning to a pout.

“I can’t stand you,” I whined.

He laughed and tugged me around and in front of him, his free hand pushing my bangs straight back from my forehead, which he leaned down to smack a fairly sloppy kiss onto. “I love you too.” He smacked my butt then and reached around me to open the back door, calling out to Brody as he did that I was _primed and ready_ for my surprise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation." ~ Robert A. Heinlein


	9. Broken Hearts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning: This chapter references the death of a minor character. It isn't graphic or detailed in any way, but it is mentioned.
> 
> I personally really like this chapter, but if you choose not to read it to protect your own mental health in light of the above warning, the next chapter will still make sense and will kind of fill in the blanks, the big ones, anyway.

_2 weeks later (late July, Year 6)_

It had been a long, hard, emotionally-fraught day - a long couple days, actually - and I hadn’t really slept at all the night before. So to say I was annoyed when I was awoken in the middle of the night (after finally falling asleep with the help of a long bath and some melatonin, both at Chris’s insistence) by what I could only assume, at first, was one or both of the dogs, well, that would qualify for understatement of the year. But then I realized the sounds I heard weren’t barks or howls or whines, they were words. They were loud, frantic, terrified words in my sweet little boy’s voice at nearly two a.m. - so frantic and terrified that I couldn't actually make out exactly what he was saying. I went from groggy and irritated to panic-stricken and completely alert. I shot upright and looked to my left to find that Chris was still, apparently, sleeping soundly. There was a part of me that hated to wake him, knowing he was just as exhausted as I was, but the more sensible part of me knew that I couldn’t handle whatever was happening on my own, and that he would be extremely upset with me if I tried.

“Chris!” I grabbed at his shoulder, shaking him a little. “Chris, wake up!” I reached for his hand then, tugging when his fingers closed around mine.

“Wha-,” he pushed himself up onto his elbows, looking around the room then back at me. “What the hell is that?” His hand tightened around mine as he dropped his head over into the other hand where it had come up, forefinger and thumb rubbing at the inside corners of his eyes.

I’d already thrown off the covers and started pushing myself out of the bed. “It’s Brody, we have to get up!” I looked back at him over my shoulder where I sat on the edge of the bed, my feet on the floor.

And then, for the first time, I actually made out the words coming from the other room. “No! No don’t! Don’t take me away from my new Mommy and Daddy! No!”

Chris heard it too, because he sprung into action, dropping my hand and jumping to his feet beside the bed. “Fuck!” The word seemed to echo, bouncing off the walls, and before I’d even made it fully onto my feet, he’d disappeared into his closet and I could hear the thuds and bangs of things being shoved, and possibly tossed, around.

“Chris, what are you,” I practically sprinted across the room to the closet doorway and watched my normally outwardly-cool-under-pressure husband destroying his own closet, “hey, what are you doing? What are you looking for?” 

He threw his hands up but didn’t turn to face me. “I don’t know, my, my shield?” He pulled down a box from the shelf, kicked aside a couple more things on the floor, then stormed past me.

I watched him head toward my closet then, and I knew he wasn’t thinking even remotely clearly. I followed him as far as the foot of the bed and stopped, calling after him. “We’re going to go in there with a Captain America shield? I don’t think it’s _actually_ bulletproof.”

He came back out of my closet, and from the sound of it he hadn’t done anywhere near the damage he’d done to his own, if he’d touched anything at all. “Yeah, well,” he threw his hands up then let them fall heavily to his hips, “it’s heavy. And I can handle it well enough to do some damage.” And okay, I couldn’t actually argue with either of those points. I’d only ever seen the prop come out as a joke, either a party trick for somewhat inebriated adult friends, or a super special treat for star-struck little ones. But I’d seen enough of what he could do with it, on-screen and off, to know that I certainly wouldn’t want to be someone who pissed him off while he was holding it. Before I could concede that, though, he went on. His eyes were dark and his voice was low and hard, and I’ve never once in my life been scared of him for as much as a second, but that moment was the closest I’ve ever come. “And there is no fucking _we_ , you’re staying right here with your phone and that baby monitor.” He pointed toward the bed as if he were telling me to get back in it.

I protested. “Chris, I’m not -”

His eyes softened, just a little, and his hand stayed up and out toward me and the bed behind me, but he turned it over so it was a little more like he was pleading with me and less like he was commanding me. “You know I don’t, _fuck_ , I don’t do this shit. I don’t boss you around and try to be the man or whatever,” he stepped a little closer to me, his outstretched hand closing around my bicep. “But it’s the middle of the night and our boy is terrified of _something_ and possibly in danger and we have no idea what we might be walking into and I don’t, I can’t,” his shoulders fell a little and his eyes pleaded with me, “please just stay here.” 

It wasn’t easy, _god_ did I want to tell him to just fuck off because I was a big girl and Brody was my little boy just as much as he was his and no, I fucking would not just stay behind, but I nodded and stepped back until the backs of my legs hit the mattress, falling heavily onto it. _Thank you,_ he mouthed, turning away just for a second, then back toward the bed and kneeling as if he was going to look under it. If I’d been in my right mind I’d have told him that the shield was downstairs in the hall closet because why on earth would we need it in the bedroom? But before either of us could think that far, we heard Brody again.

“No!” The word was practically a shriek, and it felt like a knife slicing into my chest. “I want my Mommy and Daddy!”

Chris jumped back to his feet. “Fuck it.” He was gone before I could react at all, and I turned frantically to crawl up the bed, grabbing the baby monitor off my night stand. I squinted hard into the far-too-small video screen (I’d never had complaints about it before, but suddenly it felt like the most useless, outdated piece of technology imaginable). The nightlight on the opposite side of the room from Brody’s bed didn’t come close to creating enough light for the low-resolution camera, and I could barely see anything through where we’d mounted the transmitter on a small shelf over the bed, pointed straight down at it because we didn’t want to feel like we were ‘spying’ on our own child while he played, we just wanted to feel secure that he was safe and sound when he was meant to be sleeping. Well, some help it was right then. (Again, we’d always been perfectly satisfied with it before, but we’d also never needed to see more than that Brody was tucked into the bed and not, I don’t know, rolling onto the floor or suffocating under his blankets.) I could make out flashes of movement, Brody, I was pretty sure, moving on the mattress, and then a large hand crossing in front of the screen and reaching for my son, and was it Chris’s? God, how did I not know my husband’s hands better? (Looking back, I know what a ridiculous thought that was; it was dark and the screen was tiny. At the time, though, it was unacceptable to me that I couldn’t ascertain whether that was my husband in our little boy’s room or someone else.)

I held my breath and tightened my hold on the monitor, my knuckles going white, when Chris’s voice came through it. “Hey babe, come in here. Please.” That _please_ , soft and gentle and so clearly _not_ a demand, told me that he felt bad about what he’d said before he left our room.

I tossed the monitor somewhere behind me into the mess of covers and jumped out of the bed so quickly I almost tripped. Once I’d recovered my balance, I sprinted the few yards down the hall to Brody’s room and skidded to a stop in the doorway. When I looked in, what I saw both flooded me with relief and made my heart crack a little. Brody still whimpered and writhed in his bed, directly across the room from where I stood at the door, and Chris sat on the edge of it, one hand sinking into the mattress on Brody’s opposite side and bearing his weight while the other hand opened and closed over his own knee. I could only see his profile as he angled his body and face toward the head of the bed, but even so I could see the worry, the concern, the pure fear on his face as he looked down at our sleeping boy - if you could call that sleeping. 

Sensing me in the doorway, Chris turned, and when he saw me there he squared his body to me, keeping his hand pressed into the mattress at Brody’s hip but turning his back to him to stare at me with wide eyes. “I didn’t know,” he whispered as I entered the room, stopping halfway through his sentence to turn and look back down at Brody when he flung himself from his back onto his side, almost curling himself around Chris without actually touching him. Both dogs sat at the foot of the bed on top of the comforter, staring at their smallest human silently but on full alert. When Brody stilled, Chris turned back to me and went on, still whispering, “I didn’t know if it was safe to wake him up.”

I nodded where I stood at Chris's knee, my hand resting lightly on his shoulder then sat next to him toward the foot-end of the bed, sliding my hand down his back and turning to curl it around Brody’s leg, just above his knee, shaking him lightly. “Brody, baby.” I kept my voice relatively quiet, but loud enough that I thought it would pull him from his sleep, and by extension, his nightmare. I wasn’t sure either if waking him was the best idea; maybe it was like sleepwalking, where you should let the person come out of it on their own. But I was beyond sure that I couldn’t sit there and watch him suffer and struggle with his invisible attacker the way he was.

Brody seemed to become somewhat aware of my presence as I continued to talk, appearing to be coming into consciousness, and Chris followed my lead. He turned back away from me toward Brody, looking back down into his face, scrunched and twisted in fear. “Hey buddy, wake up, come on.” Chris shook his shoulder the way I had done to his leg and he whimpered.

“Hey baby, shh,” I smoothed my hand from his knee to his hip, up and down again and again, “it’s Mommy and Daddy. Wake up for us, okay?”

Finally, after a handful of seconds that felt like forever, Brody opened his eyes. It was slow at first, his eyelids heavy and his expression groggy, but as soon as he saw Chris looking down at him he blinked and his eyes flew back open, assuring himself that Chris was there then following my voice and searching me out as well. “Mommy?”

I sighed a heavy sigh of relief and did my best to put a smile on my face for his benefit as I curled my hand around his hip. “Hi baby.”

He turned then, his head whipping back toward Chris. “Daddy.” It wasn’t a question, and that made me feel better, somehow.

“Hey bud,” Chris reached to drop his hand to the top of Brody’s head, but before he got there Brody was pushing himself up onto his hands and knees, climbing up onto Chris’s lap. “Hey, whoa, it’s okay,” Chris assured him as he scrambled onto his thighs, crossing over until he could wrap an arm around Chris’s neck, holding tight to him, and also reach to hook his other arm through mine, pulling me toward them as he knelt on Chris’s lap, “we’re not going anywhere. You were just having bad dreams.”

Chris looked at me over Brody’s head, his eyes soft and sad and a little broken-looking, as he held Brody to him with one arm wrapped low around his hips, the other hand smoothing up and down his back. I felt the bed shift, the dogs coming to lay behind us, out of the way but close enough to remind us they were there. I leaned in to kiss the back of Brody’s head, then the bare shoulder it rested on, his face buried in the crook of Chris’s neck and shoulder. I took in the way Brody clung to Chris, his little body pressed tightly to Chris’s bare chest, and I was reminded of newborns being placed, naked and unswaddled, on their fathers’ chests for skin-to-skin contact and bonding. It wasn’t all that different, I realized. 

At six years old, Brody certainly wouldn’t be considered a newborn. But we had just rounded a corner, so to speak, started a new chapter for our family. Brody had been with us for four months, and while we both loved him more than either of us could put into words and were more than happy to think of him as ours, and while he’d seemed just as happy to be there, almost from the very beginning, we’d spent most of those four months just a little bit on edge, aware of the distant but real possibility that at some point he could be taken from us. Regardless of how many times Marcus or Ms. Donovan or even Chris’s mom assured us that it was so unlikely as to be essentially considered a non-issue, we couldn’t let the thought go. We didn’t allow it to cause us to hold ourselves back, to withhold love or affection or support from Brody, but we always knew that, as much as we loved him and ignored the word _foster_ that always preceded the _parents_ that we thought of ourselves as, he did still have a mother who loved him more than her own life. And even while that very same mother had not only given us her blessing but actually asked us to consider him ours (and to make it legal), we constantly felt like we were walking a little on eggshells, waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

But just a day earlier - or two days, I guess, considering the time - Brody’s mother had passed away. She died in the same hospice house Chris and I had visited her in a few weeks before, going to sleep and just never waking up again. Chris had rubbed my back and murmured assurances that since she’d died in her sleep it had been peaceful, painless, but we both knew there was nothing peaceful about the disease that had been ravaging her body for close to a year. Most likely her body had just given up, shut down, unable to build up the strength to wake up again. The one part he was being honest about was that she didn’t have to deal with that pain anymore. While we’d known it was coming, and even that she was mostly at peace with it, it still hurt to know that she’d died. No one deserved what she’d gone through. As sad as it was, though, and as much as it hurt, even secondhand, to know that our sweet boy would never again have the chance to be with his birth mother, to have her arms around him or see her lovely smile directed at him (the chances of that had always been incredibly slim, but still, knowing there was even the slightest chance meant something), it also meant that he was that much more _ours._ So when I felt his fingers digging into my bicep and looked at him clinging to Chris’s chest and shoulders, it occurred to me that, in many ways, he was freshly born, _our_ boy, really and truly, being held by the only parents he had.

Eventually, Brody’s grip on my arm loosened and his fingers fluttered over my skin the way I so often did to him to help him fall asleep. He turned his head on Chris’s shoulder, blinking heavily at me and resituating his arm so that it kind of hung over Chris’s shoulder rather than gripping onto his neck. “Hey baby,” I reached to brush his hair out of his face, making a mental note to call later about an appointment for a cut, “you feeling any better?”

“A little.”

“Yeah?” He nodded against Chris’s shoulder and Chris leaned down to press a kiss to the back of his head. “Can you tell us what happened?” He nodded again and Chris shifted him on his lap so that he sat on Chris’s thigh, his legs stretched in front of him so they crossed over my lap. He looked down at his legs and picked at his pajama pants.

“Marcus,” he finally mumbled.

I tilted my head and looked down at him, my eyebrows drawn down and together in confusion. “Marcus?”

“Mmhmm,” he nodded then leaned over onto Chris. “He was being a bad man.”

Chris stiffened, sucking in a sharp breath and looking at me over Brody’s head. “Bad how?" He was keeping his voice even, for Brody, but for as good an actor as he was on screen and on the stage, he was not nearly as good at home or in personal situations. I could read his face, the set of his shoulders, the tone of his voice, like a book, and I knew he was considering what it might mean in real life that Brody’d had a nightmare about his case worker. 

“Sweetie,” I jumped in, brushing the backs of my fingers over his cheek, “I thought you liked Marcus. Did he do something to upset you?” I found Chris’s eyes and we waited.

After a couple deep breaths, he responded. “He was really big and his face was scary, and he had monster claws.” I stuck my bottom lip out, pouting at Chris over Brody’s head. Brody had started slow, timid, but he grew bolder as he spoke. “And he was going to take me away. He was going to take me away from you guys the way he took me away from my first mommy. And when he took me away from her he took me to that big place with all those other kids and then to those people who weren’t nice. I don’t wanna go back to those people. I wanna stay here with you.” Chris tightened his hold on him, closing his eyes and pressing his face into Brody’s sleep-tousled hair. “You play with me and read with me and I like when we make dinner together and I like Millie and Dodger and my cousins and Nana Lisa.” At the sound of their names, both dogs jumped up from where they had settled behind us, shoving their noses between Brody and Chris and Brody and me, respectively, trying desperately to get at Brody’s face with their tongues. I snapped my fingers and pointed at the floor, and they both hesitated, looking at me as if they thought they could wait me out. I snapped again and they dragged themselves around me and jumped to the floor, laying at our feet. “I love you.,” Brody nearly whimpered. “Please don’t send me back.”

Everything clicked, then. Marcus had come to the house to deliver the news about Mallory to Chris and me in person, and though we’d left Brody playing in his room while we’d talked (after Brody had insisted on taking Marcus up to show him all his things) and had waited until the next day to explain him what had happened, once we’d had time to collect our own thoughts and figure out _how_ to explain it to him, we’d both been quiet and tense, just _off_ for the rest of the day. It was no surprise Brody had picked up on it, and it was no surprise that he’d connected Marcus’s visit to what we’d told him. But god, the idea that he thought we were going to _send him back_ , my heart shattered. “Oh Brody, sweetheart -”

Chris cut me off, not rudely, but just because he was probably unable to contain himself, pushing Brody a little farther down his thighs toward his knees so he could look down into his face more directly. “Hey bud, look at me.” Brody turned his face from his own lap up toward Chris’s, looking him in the eyes, I believed. “We’re not sending you _anywhere_ .” I saw the hand closer to me flex on Brody’s hip. “We love you too, very, _very_ much. We want you right here.” We hesitated to ever make any promises that Brody would never have to leave us, because we knew that there were parts of that decision that were out of our control, as much as we hated it. But we never shied away from telling him how much we loved him, how much we wanted him. So, all things considered with the events of the past few days, Chris seemed okay to maybe push those boundaries a little bit more than usual, expressing himself in a way that was less cautious, less reserved than normal (promising not to send him anywhere could sound dangerously, to six-year-old ears, like a promise that he would never _go_ anywhere). I made the decision then to push the envelope just a bit farther, definitely farther than I ever would have before.

“That was just a bad dream. Mr. Marcus is a very nice man, and he just wants what’s best for you. He’s not going to take you away from us.” I felt the deep breath Chris pulled in when I said it, but he didn’t say anything to contradict me, probably just because he wanted to avoid exposing Brody to any more tension or conflict. 

Brody was already a ward of the Commonwealth, meaning that if we’d really wanted to, we could have started the adoption petition process at any time. We’d chosen to wait, out of respect for Mallory, even though we knew that’s what she wanted in the long run. It just seemed that the right thing to do was wait, officially claiming her son only after she'd passed. But we’d told Marcus that’s what we wanted to do, and the papers were already drawn up and waiting in a file in Ms. Donovan’s office, complete with a character reference from Mallory herself, stating not only that she thought we would be good parents in general, but that we were the exact parents she wanted for her son. The letter wasn’t binding in any way, because Mallory had already given over her parental rights and no longer had any legal say in the matter, but it certainly couldn’t hurt, and we’d need character references anyway. Besides that, though, Marcus had assured us that he couldn’t think of anything that would get in the way of us adopting Brody as soon as we were ready to do so; all of our home visits had gone better than perfectly, which was expressly stated in all of his reports, Brody had been thriving at school, both academically and socially, since being with us (aside from that one isolated incident with his insensitive, racist classmate, but no one could claim that was in any way his fault, or ours), and both Chris and I checked every box to be considered ‘fit parents,’ and then some. I knew there were no guarantees until we stood in front of a judge and everything had been signed, stamped, and sealed, so to speak, and I hoped I wasn’t speaking out of turn by making that promise on Marcus’s behalf, but I just needed the fear to leave my little boy’s eyes. And if Marcus’s reputation with him came out unharmed as well, that would just be a plus.

“Do I have to see him again?”

I cupped Brody’s chin in my hand and tilted his face up toward me. “Only one or two more times.”

“And he’s not going to take me away?” His brown eyes were huge, pleading with me to make promises that would wipe away his fears. All I wanted to do was gather him up in my arms and hold him until he was so confident, so secure in our love and the knowledge that he was _ours_ that he would never have another bad dream. I knew it didn’t really work that way, but god I wanted it to.

“Like Mommy said,” Chris answered, smoothing his palm in big, sweeping circles over Brody’s back, “he just wants what’s best for you.” He looked at me over Brody’s head when Brody nodded and leaned back over onto him, his head resting on Chris’s collarbone. I could tell that what I’d said before made him nervous. If the way he’d deflected Brody’s question hadn’t given it away, the way he looked at me, not exactly disappointed or reproachful but skeptical, concerned, would have. I mouthed a _sorry_ and slipped my hand into the one resting on Brody’s leg. I watched Brody for a second, his fingers twisting in the drawstring of Chris’s pants and his eyelids growing visibly heavy, and when I looked back up Chris was still watching me. He shook his head slowly, his eyes falling closed and his lips curling into a resigned almost-smile, then leaned over to kiss my temple. I knew he didn’t exactly approve of what I’d said, the way I’d risked making promises that we still weren’t 100% sure we could keep, as much as we wanted to. And the last thing I ever, ever, wanted to do was give him reason to be disappointed in me. But for as much as he probably didn’t think it was a good idea, I thought he could understand why I’d done it. 

Brody had shifted when Chris leaned over to me, and as he slipped a little farther down Chris’s chest, his body jerked and he jolted upright, looking between us and blinking rapidly. I bit my lip and Chris chuckled. “You about ready to go back to sleep now?” He quirked an eyebrow as he looked down at the sleepy boy on his lap. Brody frowned for a second, no doubt because now that he had our full attention he really didn’t want to go back to sleep, but the frown was interrupted by a yawn and he just sighed, leaning back against Chris. I turned to press my face into Chris’s shoulder so Brody wouldn’t see my grin and Chris squeezed my hand for a second before pulling his free to grip Brody by both hips and push him away again. He knew Brody was trying to avoid answering him, hoping, probably, that Chris would drop it and let him go back to sleep right there in his arms. Instead Chris just looked at him, eyebrows raised and awaiting an answer.

“Can you sing for me?” Brody finally asked in his sweetest voice.

Chris just grinned and nodded. “Sure buddy, any requests?”

“Disney.” Of course. He’d obviously been exposed to Disney before he came to live with us, that much was clear just from how much he already knew about the characters and the stories. But becoming a member of the Evans family - even if it wasn’t 100% official just yet - meant that he was practically inundated with it. It took him almost no time at all to share Chris’s love for the entire Disney universe, possibly more because of how much Chris loved it than for any other reason. I watched them both, and I didn’t miss the satisfied, even proud, look on Brody’s face when Chris smiled a little wider at that. Then he added, a little more quietly, “And will you stay?”

Chris pulled a face, a goofy, over-exaggerated one that said, _Obviously, was there ever any other option?_ “Of course buddy, how can I sing you to sleep if I don’t stay?” He squeezed his arms around Brody’s middle for a second, but Brody wiggled away.

“ _Both_ of you,” he turned his eyes on me. “Stay while I’m asleep?”

I lifted my hand from where it had dropped to the comforter when Chris let it go to curl it around Brody’s knee. “Of course sweetheart. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Here,” Chris jumped in when Brody didn’t respond, possibly still a little worried that one or both of us was going to leave. Chris lifted him fully off his lap and stood, turning to lay him back on the bed where we’d found him. “Why don’t you and Mommy lay up here with Baby,” he grabbed the doll by the one foot sticking out of the tangled mess of blankets and pressed it gently to Brody’s chest until he wrapped his arms around it, “and I’ll sit right down here and sing.” He sat on the floor just next to the head of the bed, pulling his knees up toward his chest and wrapping his arms loosely around them.

We both watched Brody settle in, his eyes glued to the doll and his little fingers plucking at the buttons on the front as I worked to get him tucked back in, smoothing his blankets over and around him. Brody had plenty of dolls and stuffed animals by that point - ones we’d bought him, a Pride bear Scott had given him, countless other gifts from Chris’s mom and his sister and her kids, a stuffed UK wildcat from Ashley, even an over 20-year-old stuffed panda he’d managed to steal from me - and he rotated through them as his nightly snuggle buddies. Baby, the one that Mallory had given him when she had first gotten sick and that Mac had rescued from Brody’s previous foster parents, had been his pick about 75% of the time for the first several weeks, but over time, it had become more or less a normal part of the rotation. Earlier that night though, when Chris and I had gone to tuck him in, he’d looked at Chris and said, _I know it’s Wildcat’s turn tonight, but I think I want Baby instead._ Chris hadn’t really reacted, just saying _Sure buddy, whatever you want_ , and handing him the doll, but when he'd looked at me, his eyes had spoken volumes. 

In the four months he had been with us, Brody hadn’t talked about Mallory a lot. We gave him opportunities, asking him questions and setting up scenarios in which it would be natural for the conversation to follow that path, but he didn’t always take them, and we didn’t want to push. I was pretty sure his therapist was getting a little farther on that front, and when I’d asked her if we needed to be doing more, she said that what we were doing seemed to be working for him, so we didn’t need to change, at least for the time being. We really just wanted him to know, more than anything else, that it was okay for him to think about her, miss her, love her. And if he _wanted_ to talk about her, that was okay with us too. When we’d sat him down the previous morning to explain to him that she’d passed away, he seemed to understand what we were saying, as much as a six-year-old could, and he took it all in without breaking down as we’d worried he might. He had been very quiet for the rest of the day, though, almost the way he had been when he’d first come to us, and we’d struggled all day to find a balance between keeping him occupied and not smothering him. I would never in a million years be upset with him for missing his birth mother, and it made perfect sense that he would choose her doll to keep close to him that night. The part we hadn’t realized at the time, though, and which was breaking my heart as I settled in behind him where he lay on his side looking over at Chris, propped on one elbow so I could run the other hand through his hair and look across him down to where my husband sat, preparing to sing our boy to sleep, was that he was not only mourning what he had lost, he was worrying about what else he thought he might lose. 

“How does _Aladdin_ sound, is that Disney enough for you?” Chris asked him once Brody and I were finally settled, one of Chris's arms resting on the edge of the mattress and the other hand smoothing through the fur on Dodger’s back where he’d come to stretch out next to him, Millie jumping up to curl into a ball behind my knees at the same time.

Brody nodded and hummed. “Mmhmm.”

“Awesome, let’s do it.”

I can’t say for sure, because I never asked him (and he would only have played coy if I had), but I knew Chris chose _A Whole New World_ completely intentionally, knowing the moment Brody asked for a Disney song that it was too perfectly fitting in that moment to pass up. Even there on the bedroom floor in the middle of the night, his vocal chords nowhere near warm, the words came out quiet, but smooth and in tune. He looked over Brody, winking at me as he crooned, _Tell me princess, now when did you last let your heart decide,_ and my actual heart stuttered, skipped a beat, even, and I closed my eyes tight, my hand coming to curl around Brody’s shoulder as I leaned down to kiss the side of his head. Yes, Chris knew exactly what he was doing. He didn’t miss a beat, though, his voice carrying on and his hand coming up to tickle Brody’s stomach lightly over the blankets when he sang about _magic carpet rides._ And when he looked back up to me, eyebrows raised, as Jasmine’s part neared, I only shook my head and mouthed an unmistakable _no_ and he rolled his eyes but kept going, knowing, instinctively, probably, how to adjust the notes so they still sounded right even though they were far from their original octave. When he got to the actual duet though, I couldn’t resist. I settled my head on Brody’s pillow, right behind his, and murmured Jasmine’s lines opposite Chris’s Aladdin. I couldn’t begin to come close to Chris vocally, and I would never try. But I wanted Brody to hear both of our voices as he drifted to sleep, secure not only of his place in our world, but that he _was_ our world.

I lay behind Brody, feeling his breathing even out and his body sink farther into the mattress as we sang. By the time the song was finished I was pretty sure he was asleep, the long, emotional day and the terrifying dream and the fact that it was somewhere between two and three in the morning all adding up to a fairly quick descent back into slumber once we’d managed to get him calmed down. (We seemed to have sung our highly ineffectual guard dogs to sleep as well, if Millie’s dream twitches and Dodger’s snores were any indication.) Still, Chris and I were both quiet for several more minutes, just to be safe. Eventually though, Brody rolled over onto his back, one arm still clutching Baby tight to his chest, but the other flying straight for my face. I pushed myself up to sitting as quickly as I thought I could manage without jostling the bed or the sleeping boy in it, just avoiding a small but sharp elbow to the nose. I watched him for a moment, wary, but when it was clear that he really was asleep and that it was probably safe to let my guard down for a minute, at least, I shifted my attention to Chris.

I could’ve laughed, cried, and pressed kisses all over his face, all at the same time. My six-foot, solid muscle, beer-drinking, Patriots-loving, superhero husband was on the floor, wearing nothing but the soft cotton pajama pants he’d invested in when we’d decided to become parents, tucked into the fetal position on the brightly colored rug in front of Brody’s bed, my old oversized stuffed panda shoved under his head and his arms wrapped tightly around its legs, a sleeping Dodger sprawled behind him. “How ya doin’ down there, Aladdin?” I asked, teasing but genuinely concerned, stretching to pull the quilt from the end of the bed. I leaned across Brody and shook out the blanket in Chris’s direction, holding the corners on one side and letting them go only when the other side of it had fluttered down over him.

He scoffed. “I was just thinking it’s a good thing my Cap days are over.” I watched him adjust the blanket over himself, letting go of my bear to tuck the quilt under his chin, his hands still holding tight to the hem as he curled it under and rolled onto his back. It was the same quilt he’d had made for me over three years earlier. The quilt, a literal patchwork of college t-shirts my former students had given me once they went away for school, had spent four months on the foot of my bed in Virginia, then a good year or so at the foot of _our_ bed in Massachusetts, until I’d decided it just didn’t _fit_ there, with all the clean, neutral colors and unfinished wood. He wouldn’t let me put it completely away, though, insisting I couldn’t hide such an important part of my life on account of his decorating tastes (because I really hadn’t redecorated at all, just adding in a few things that had meaning to me here and there; I loved his style and it felt right for my new chapter, my new book, not to fill the house with stuff I picked just so that I could say I did), so it got folded neatly and draped over the back of the armchair in the corner of the room. Brody had discovered the quilt within his first week with us, and after asking a million questions about what each square meant and why I had them, he fell in love with it. After a handful of days in which he asked at least three questions a day about the quilt or the kids who had inspired it, completely out of nowhere ( _That’s my name!_ he’d exclaimed when he asked about _the orange and blue one with the cool swords_ and I told him it was in honor of the first Brody I’d unofficially adopted), it only seemed right for the quilt to get passed down, or at least passed on to a different room. Selfishly, something about the idea of him getting comfort from something that was not only mine but that truly represented what family meant to me felt really, really nice.

Finally comfortable(ish) under the blanket, Chris went on. “If I had to shoot a fight scene tomorrow it might kill me.” He pulled his arms from under the quilt to rest on top of it over his chest.

“Do you want to switch? I _am_ younger than you,” I teased. At the same time though, I surveyed my surroundings, planning the escape route that was least likely to disturb Brody and Millie. I could probably scoot to the foot of the bed, I thought, and climb off there.

“Uh huh, cute.” Maybe my eyes had finally fully adjusted or maybe there was enough light from the moon and Brody’s nightlight, but either way, I could see him roll his eyes even in the dark, reaching out to the side with one hand to rub Dodger’s side when he whimpered in his sleep. “But no,” He sighed and shook his head. “I don’t want to risk waking him. And you actually _do_ have to fight tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. I was teaching an early Combat class the next day, the six a.m. weekday class that was typically full of a mix of professionals who wanted their workout before their workday and stay-at-home moms getting in their workouts before their husbands left for the day and they were left alone with the kids, a class I couldn’t normally attend, let alone teach. But I’d been picking up a lot of sub assignments since school had gotten out, because why not? There were always classes that needed covered, with the other instructors using the summer to go on vacation with their families, and since I wasn’t working for a few months it was nice to have things here and there to to fill my time while still allowing me to be a full-time mom for Brody during his first summer break and his first extended period with us with no school. Hopefully by the next summer we’d be planning our own family vacations, trips to Disney with the rest of the Evans clan, going to watch Chris work on the west coast or some fun location, if he decided to pick up a job, but for that first summer we’d decided to keep things as normal and low-key as possible. Ms. Donovan had told us she thought she could get something worked out if we did want to go somewhere out of state, but it felt unnecessary. We could give him a good summer staying close to home - a camping trip or two, lake days and fishing at Walden pond, exploring museums and historical sites in Boston - while still keeping the focus on us being a family rather than the extravagance of some high-dollar trip. 

Chris wasn’t wrong, on either count, but I still felt bad that I was in the bed - a little cramped and about to be sharing a pillow with a six-year-old, but on an actual mattress nonetheless - and he was stretched out on the floor, nothing between himself and the hardwood floor other than a relatively thin rug made for a much younger body to play on. “You can go back to bed if you want, I’ll stay here with Little Man.” Chris hadn’t worked out of the state since before Brody had come to live with us and the thought of him sleeping in a different room felt almost foreign at that point, but my selfish desire to have him close shouldn’t be a reason for him to be uncomfortable and get a shitty night’s sleep.

“Nah,” he shook his head, “I told him I’d stay, I want to stay.” He turned his head on his makeshift pillow then, watching Brody as he spoke, “He may not remember any of this when he wakes up, but if he does, and I’m not here, I’d never forgive myself.” I watched him for a second, still feeling bad, but I knew I wasn’t going to change his mind. Instead of trying, I settled myself back in beside Brody. I hadn’t thought to get under the covers as we tucked Brody in, and I was too afraid of waking him, or Millie, to try to do so then. Normally it was next to impossible for me to sleep without blankets over me, but as I tried to get comfortable, Brody rolled to face me then nearly wrapped his little body around mine, clinging to me, and I thought I might actually be okay without blankets of my own.

“Chris?” I whispered once Brody was still again and I’d found a position I thought might allow me to fall asleep for the couple hours I had left before I had to be back up. He hummed. “I wouldn’t want to do this with anyone but you.”

I couldn’t see him, but his voice, low and smooth and reassuring, cut through the dark. “You’re so good at this babe, you’d be fine.”

“Maybe.” Not a chance, I thought, but I didn’t want to argue with him. “But I wouldn’t _want_ to. Doing this with you, doing _anything_ with you, it’s just better. You make my life better.” I looked down at Brody’s head, his breath fanning over my collarbone in little puffs, and my fingers drifted over his spine. “And, not to sound, I don’t know, conceited, but I think we, together, make his life better.”

“We’re a team, baby girl, always have been.” After a few seconds of waiting for him to say more, I decided that must have been the extent of his statement. Simple, concise, right to the point. He was really good with his words, but he was also really good sometimes at using very few of them. So when he did speak again, almost a minute later, it startled me a little. “Speaking of team,” he cleared his throat, “I’m sorry. For before.” I squinted up at the ceiling in confusion. “For what I said before I left our room,” he clarified. 

Oh. That. “Chris -,”

“I know you can take care of yourself. You’re smart, and strong, and tough as hell, and for me to say anything that would imply that I think otherwise was a dick move.” I heard his long, deep exhale. “I just, before we went to bed tonight I would have told anyone that my greatest fear in the world was that something would happen to you or Brody. But in that moment, we were in there, and something _was_ happening to him in here and we had no idea what it was, and you said _we_ were going to come in here and it was like a knife in my gut, because suddenly I realized something could happen to _both_ of you, and I’m not prepared for that.”

 _Oh god_. I wrapped my arms around Brody, pressing my face into his hair and breathing in his scent as I hugged him close. 

“I know fear isn’t a good excuse to be an ass, but I was fucking terrified. Still, I’m sorry for what I said, and for how I said it.”

“Let’s be honest here, Chris, we were _both_ terrified. If I had thought it was something I could handle myself I wouldn’t have woken you up to begin with. Like you said, we’re a team,” I chuckled a little, keeping it to one quick exhale through my nose so as not to wake the sleeping boy on my chest. “You were planning to barge in here with a movie prop, and I didn’t even think to look at the video monitor until you said it. We need each other to work. You were right, it made sense for me to stay back in case I needed to call the police and, really, because if there had been someone in the house I would probably have panicked and done something stupid or clumsy and gotten in the way. Throwing punches at imaginary opponents at the gym doesn’t exactly translate to a real-life home intruder situation.”

“Hey,” he chimed in, “I still maintain I can do some damage with the shield.”

I smiled to myself. “I don’t doubt it. But seriously, under the circumstances, I don’t blame you.” I smirked to myself, “Just don’t think that means you have permission to start bossing me around now.”

He laughed quietly. “Never.” Then, “Well, not _never._ Unless I’m wrong, and I’m not,” I could practically hear his smirk, “you _do_ like it when I boss you around sometimes.”

“Hey Chris,” I nearly purred, my voice low.

“Hmm?”

“Maybe don’t talk about our sex life when I’m sharing a twin-sized bed with our six-year-old?”

He groaned and I could see his face in my mind, his nose scrunched and his eyes squeezed closed and his lips pressed together. “Noted.” He groaned again and I just shook my head and rolled my eyes.

A second later, after we’d both had time to shake the awkward moment, he cleared his throat, “Um, speaking of _our six-year-old,_ ” he trailed off and I hummed for him to go on, shifting to remove said six-year-old’s knee from the general vicinity of my bladder. “I think we need to go through with the adoption as quickly as possible. I don’t know if he’ll really understand what it all means, but if he does, and if it makes him feel even a little more secure, keeps this from happening again or makes it less frequent, then it’s worth it and I want to get it done.” I looked down at what I could see of Brody’s face in the dark as Chris spoke; it was calm and peaceful in sleep at that moment, but I remembered the panic in his eyes when he’d first opened them and the way he'd clung to Chris and me. I couldn’t have argued with what Chris was saying if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t. “And honestly?” He went on, and I could hear him shuffling below me, punching my poor panda into oblivion to try to form it into something more closely resembling a comfortable pillow. “Selfishly I want it for us, too. I mean, I already consider him mine, _ours_ , and I know you do too, but I want it to be completely legit, fully legal.”

I barely let him finish before I started speaking almost over him. “I want that too, so much.” I sighed, a sigh of relief that I’d been holding in since we’d met Mallory, possibly even longer, since the day Brody had been brought to our front door, or, maybe, since that first time I’d heard his name back in January. “I’ll call Marcus tomorrow and tell him we’re ready to move forward.”

I didn’t sleep much over the next few hours, and I doubt Chris did either. But all the time I spent not sleeping I spent listening to my husband’s deep, even breathing just a few feet away and watching my little boy sleep peacefully, happily, his ear over my heart while I traced the shell of his other ear, the bridge of his nose, his eyelashes where they fanned over his cheekbones, with just the tip of my finger and rubbed wide circles over his back with my palm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "To mend a heart you didn't break is part of loving a child you didn't make." ~ Anonymous


	10. Worth the Wait

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay folks, this is it. And honestly, I'm a little sad. I mean, it's not IT it; it's not like I'm stopping the series, Chris and the narrator still have plenty of stories to tell. We're just at the end of this particular installment, which has challenged me and pushed me out of my comfort zone in ways that no other story ever has. So, with that being said, thank you all so much for coming on this ride with me and for being so incredibly supportive.

_ 4 weeks later (late August, Year 6) _

I sighed as I finished buckling the straps on my wedge sandals, a little exasperated but not surprised to find that Brody’s cornflower blue polo (picked specifically because it somehow managed to complement his dark skin, hair, and eyes, making the brown sparkle and pop, and also Chris’s and my blue eyes and much lighter complexions) was, yet again, half un-tucked. I’d last fixed it just before putting on my shoes. “C’mere bud.” He heaved a sigh of his own and came to stand just in front of where I sat on the couch, standing beside my leg so that the mauve and blush flowers on my ivory dress danced beautifully next to his shirt. And yes, maybe I’d picked all of our outfits, including Chris’s navy suit and wine-colored tie, with the aim of looking coordinated and polished without being matchy-matchy. (Chris’s stylist could have done a far better job, I’m sure, but this wasn’t a work event, it wasn’t for the public, it was all about our family, and I wanted to keep it that way.) We would be taking the first photo in which we were officially and legally a family, two parents - no prefix on that - and their son, in a few hours; who could blame me for wanting to take a step up, just that once, from the goofy snapshots and selfies we were so good at? 

“Alright,” I said as I tucked the shirt back in and, feeling that his khakis were still far from tight, tightened his belt by one hole, hoping that might help keep the shirt in place. “Do you think maybe you can slow down, just a little bit, so we don’t have to go through this again?” He nodded, but his bottom lip pushed out and his eyelids grew pitifully heavy over his eyes, and all I could think was that he may not have gotten anything from either of us biologically, but that was absolutely Chris’s pout. “It won’t be forever, I promise. We’re heading out just as soon as your daddy gets down here.” 

Brody turned and leaned over onto me, his arm running from about the middle of my thigh to where his hand plucked at the hem of my skirt just above my knee. "Are we going to church?" The question took me only a little by surprise. Chris and I had never taken him to church, because it wasn’t something we did ourselves, but after what Mallory had told us about Brody’s birth father’s family the one time we’d met her, it wouldn’t be a shock if he’d been at least a handful of times before he’d come into our lives. It just hadn’t occurred to me that would be the first place his six-year-old mind would go when the three of us got dressed in, well, our Sunday best, all together for the first time.

"No baby,” I smoothed my hand over his hair then ran it down to curl around his shoulder then the top of his arm to pull him a little closer, leaning down to kiss the top of his head, “we're not going to church."

"Then why are we all dressed up?" He tugged a little at his shirt where I’d just tucked it in and when I cleared my throat he looked up at me guiltily. You would have thought I’d put him in a three-piece suit rather than a short-sleeved polo and khakis, the way he’d been pouting for the last 30 minutes. I hadn’t had the heart to tell him that he probably had a lot more  _ church clothes _ in his future, once Chris and I decided he was old enough to understand what it really meant to be the son of  _ Chris Evans: Movie Star  _ and make his own decisions about if and when he wanted to be in positions where his picture would be taken and posted online and in magazines (until then we were making the decision for him, and the decision was that he would be kept as far away from the media as possible).

"Okay buddy, come here.” I scooted from where I’d been sitting toward the center of the couch all the way to the end, letting my hand rest in the center of his back as he moved with me. “I want to show you some pictures." I leaned over to pull the photo album from where we kept it in the drawer of the end table. It wasn’t a wedding album; we’d had a very small, not very formal wedding that honestly didn’t seem to warrant its own album - or maybe it was just that we preferred something more casual, more organic. Either way, it was an  _ us  _ album. There was the picture a film crew member had taken as Chris had held me while I cried in my own living room after we filmed our scene together for the movie, a handful of selfies in a variety of places and situations, pictures of us with his family and the one I’d created at school, and, yes, several from our wedding, mostly candids, though we’d had a former student of mine who was in school for photography and graphic design take more professional ones as well. There weren’t any of Brody in that album, because he  _ did _ have his own album, in addition to the many individual photos of him and us that were displayed all over the house - in frames, on the fridge, pinned to the bulletin board behind Chris’s desk.

I  opened the album toward the center, where I’d find the pictures from the wedding. I could see Brody’s interest, so I didn’t say anything at first, just flipping the pages, not rushing, but not spending much time on any one page either, letting him get a quick look at each page. It occurred to me that for all the time we spent making sure Brody knew he was part of our family, he really knew nothing about Chris and me before him. I made a mental note that we should work on changing that, at least a little.

I stopped turning pages when I got to my favorite picture, one of Chris and me from the back, just at the edge of the water that backed up to ‘Big Brody’s’ family’s backyard, taking a moment away from our guests. My fingers drifted over the picture and I felt the small, soft smile growing on my lips.

"This one is on the wall at Nana’s house,” Brody said quietly, pointing to the picture on the opposite page of the full bridal party at the altar during the ceremony, one of the few semi-professional shots that had made it into the book. “That's a really pretty dress."

"Thank you, baby.” I hugged him a little tighter to me for a second. “And you see how nice Daddy looks in his suit? And Uncle Scott, and Uncle Spencer?"

Spencer was my oldest friend, aside from Ashley (if you didn’t count people I’d gone to school with who were ‘social media only’ friends, and I didn’t). He’d started student teaching a few weeks into my first year at my very first school, a suburban middle school in Louisiana, and we’d hit it off right away, bonding over being two of the only three faculty members under 50, the fact that we were tiny blue specks in a vast sea of red, and, in some way we couldn’t even explain, an almost magnetic pull that drew us together without even a true conscious awareness of it on our parts. Early on in my relationship with Chris, right after my very visit to Massachusetts, I think, Spencer made it very clear to me that he was extremely happy for me and my relationship with Chris, but if I thought I was going to replace him with Scott, I needed to do a lot more thinking. I’d laughed and called him insane, but I also warmed a little at the thought that he got protective over our friendship. I didn’t care if some of his motivation for continuing to be so involved in my life was jealousy, I was just happy to have him there. 

That involvement meant that of course he’d insisted on regular Skype dates once Brody came into our lives so he could meet his new nephew, and as often as not, his husband Corey joined him (probably to make sure Spencer didn’t say anything  _ too  _ inappropriate - Corey was by far the more calm, level-headed of the two). There were no complaints on Chris’s or my end; the way we saw it, the more family Brody had (including  _ guncles _ , as Scott had called himself and, by extension, Spencer and Corey, making Chris laugh so hard he’d fallen over onto my lap where we both sat on his mom’s couch), the better. We made sure he had no room to doubt how much we loved him, and we wanted him to see how many other people loved him as well.

Brody nodded, still studying the photo and, probably, the clothes of the men in it. "Mmhmm"

"This was Mommy and Daddy's wedding. Do you know what happens at a wedding?" I could practically see how badly he wanted to say yes. Like me when I was his age, he wanted so badly to be agreeable, to make people happy, especially Chris and me. But a deep vein of honesty ran through everything he did, and finally he shook his head. "It's when two grown-ups love each other so much they decide they want to become each other's family, like Mommy and Daddy, or Uncle Spencer and Uncle Corey.” 

“So,” I went on, trying to explain weddings to my fidgety six-year-old, “they invite their friends and families to come watch while they make special promises, called vows, to always love each other and take care of each other.” He’d turned a little so that his stomach pressed against the outside of my thigh and he sort of draped himself across my lap and the photo album, looking up at me as I talked. “And somebody special, like a judge or a preacher, asks them some questions and guides them through their vows, and then at the end they sign a paper that makes them family, legally and officially." I combed my fingers through his hair, swooping his bangs across his forehead, and smiled down at him, waiting for whatever questions might come next.

All he said was, "Oh." I could tell he was waiting for me to make the connection between that and why he was wearing a shirt with a collar that he had to keep tucked in.

"Sounds nice, right?"

"Mmhmm," he nodded, but it was a little noncommittal, disinterested, almost. “Are we going to a wedding?”

“No baby,” I shook my head and brushed a thumb across his cheek, “do you remember when Daddy and I asked you if you would want to stay with us and be our little boy forever?" He smiled then, even blushed a little, and nodded. "Well, in order to make that legal and official and make sure no one  _ ever _ tries to make you go anywhere else,” I stopped for a second while he pushed himself up to sit next to me on the couch, leaning over against me. I pulled my arm from between us to wrap it around him, holding him close by his opposite hip, “we have to go to an adoption hearing, which is kind of like a wedding, but instead of two grown ups who want to be together forever, it's one or two grown ups who want to be parents to a little boy or girl forever.” I had to take a moment then to compose myself, because while it was everything I’d wanted since the moment he stepped foot on our front porch, maybe longer, in some ways, to hear myself saying it out loud, to him, in that way, was almost too much for me to take. I looked down at him while he looked down at the photo album in my lap, still open to the page of wedding pictures. Finally, I finished my explanation, getting to what he really wanted to know in the first place. “That's what we're doing today, and for something so important, sometimes you want to get dressed up and look nice.”

“Oh.” If he felt any of the heaviness, the emotional weight, that I was feeling at that moment, it didn’t show. (And god I loved that for him, loved his resilience. Sure, he had moments where it was clear how affected he’d been by everything he’d gone through, some heartbreaking and others incredibly frustrating, but he was so willing to let us comfort and reassure him, and he trusted us so completely, that they didn’t usually last long, and ultimately they didn’t prevent him from being the loving, kind, thoughtful little boy we were more than ready to make our own.) He only shrugged. “Okay, I guess that’s a good enough reason to wear dress clothes.”

“Speak for yourself, buddy,” Chris’s voice, deep and smooth, but teasing, boomed from behind us and we both turned to watch him over the back of the couch, “she’s not making you wear a tie.” He adjusted said tie as he pushed off the wide frame of the cased opening between the living and dining rooms.

“I don’t  _ have  _ any ties,” Brody insisted as Chris came our way.

Chris’s head fell back and he drew out his next couple words. “Ohh, right. I forgot.” He rounded the end table then perched on the arm of the couch next to me, draping his arm across the back and leaning down until his chin rested lightly on top of my head, his other hand curling around the shoulder closest to him and his thumb brushing back and forth from my skin to the wide strap of my dress. “Well, I guess that's okay. You look pretty good anyway. You’ve got the cute factor on your side.” He lifted his hand from the back couch cushion and reached like he was going to ruffle Brody’s hair, stopping at the last second and smoothing it carefully down the back of his head instead. His chest pressed to the back of my neck and shoulder and I could feel the rumble of his inaudible chuckle at the horrified look on our little boy’s face when he thought Chris was going to mess up his hair, meaning he’d have to sit through me fixing it again.

Brody looked back down at the album on my lap, flipping back one page to study some of the pictures I’d gone past before. “Daddy?” He craned his neck to look up at Chris.

“Yeah bud?” Chris pushed himself up a little, still on the arm of the couch but sitting mostly upright with his hand braced just behind my shoulder.

Brody dropped his head again, his index finger tracing over the outline of Chris and me dancing together on the make-shift dance floor on the same patio we’d danced on when he proposed. “Mommy was really pretty at your wedding.”

Chris slipped his hand under my hair at the base of my neck. “Mommy’s always really pretty.” I looked up at him and rolled my eyes good naturedly, a light blush creeping across my cheeks, and he just winked before tilting my chin up with one finger and bending to press his lips softly to mine.

Chris was still smiling when he pulled away, and I couldn’t help but do the same as Brody went on. “Yeah. You guys kiss a lot.” It was an observation, not an accusation, and by the time I turned to look over at him he already had his eyes back on the pictures he was continuing to flip through, still moving backward. Chris only laughed.

“Sure do, Mr. Observant.”

Brody’s brow was furrowed when he looked up at his dad. “What does that mean?”

Chris laughed again and pushed himself off the arm of the couch to stand just in front of it, jutting his chin toward the opening that led to the entryway. “It means go get your shoes on because I’m about to kiss your mommy again.”

“Fine,” Brody huffed and closed the photo album so it sat squarely on my lap. “But it’s not like it’s a secret.” He hopped off the couch and headed out of the living room toward the front door, where we’d recently put in a three-section hall tree just on the other side of the living room wall, one section for each of us. Each night we went through the ritual of putting everything each of us would need the next morning into our cubbies - shoes in the square cubbies all the way at the bottom, jackets, purses, tote bags, and backpacks hanging on the hooks in the tall middle sections, anything else that might come in handy in the baskets in the top row of cubbies, and dog collars and leashes hanging from the hooks on the end. At first, Chris and I had done it alongside Brody to model what we wanted from him, but it didn’t take long to realize just how much smoother it made our mornings not only to have all Brody’s things right there together, but also for me not to have to run around the house looking for the keys that never seemed to make it into my purse (or, starting the next week, the lanyard that held my school id badge) or for Chris not to have to check in 10 different places for his sunglasses. And, of all things, Brody loved that his shoes had a ‘home’ and that he could sit right in his cubby to put them on.

I smoothed my hands over the photo album then turned to put it back into the drawer I’d pulled it from. “That boy is a mess,” I said, without looking up.

“Uh huh,” I felt Chris’s hand cup my chin and he lifted my face so he could look down at it, one eyebrow quirked, “and so are you. What’s that face?”

I huffed out a breath and rolled my eyes. Of course I had ‘a face.’ No matter how good I might have been at saying the right things, the things people wanted to hear, my face never lied or hid anything, no matter how much I may have wanted it to. (And I didn’t want to lie to Chris, or keep things from him, exactly, but I also didn’t always want to subject him to every single one of the anxiety rabbit holes my brain went down.) “Do we kiss too much in front of him?” I squinted a little up at him and chewed on the inside of my bottom lip.

“What?” He laughed, then realized I was being completely serious. “No! No. Hey,” he bent and grabbed my hands where they fidgeted in my lap and used them to pull me up, nearly crashing me against him and wrapping his arms low around my waist as my own settled on his chest, “what’s that saying,  _ the best thing a father can do for his children is love their mother _ ? Something like that?” He shrugged and his thumb rubbed over the very base of my spine where his hands hung just above my butt. “I’m not a perfect dad and I’m going to screw up a lot of things, but two things Brody is never going to have to question are how much I love him, or how much I love you,” one hand stayed at the small of my back but the other came up to brush my hair over my shoulder and stayed there, his thumb drifting lightly along the underside of my jaw. “It won’t kill him to see some kissing now and then. Hell, he sees the same thing on the Disney channel.”

I raised my eyebrows at him, barely holding back my grin. “You’ve got a lot of reasons not to cut back on the kissing.”

“Oh, I’ve got more,” he wiggled his eyebrows at me, “do you need to hear them?” 

“No, I think you made your point.” And to make  _ my  _ point, I closed both hands around his tie and tugged him down to me, his grin still in place when his lips met mine. “How long were you standing back there?” I asked him when I pulled back after a couple seconds.

He shrugged, waiting while I wiped the sheer gloss from his bottom lip with my thumb. “A while,” he answered when I stepped back to grab a tissue off the end table to wipe the gloss onto before I accidentally got it on his clothes or mine. “You’re so good with him.” He dropped onto the couch, right where I’d been sitting before, and tugged on the skirt of my dress, wrapping his hands around my hips once I came closer and maneuvering me to sit just on the front of his lap, angled so I could drop one arm over his shoulders and look down at him.

“So are you,” I told him, smoothing his tie where I’d bunched it in my hands.

He shrugged again, “It’s different. You just have this way of making things make sense for him. He knows, and  _ I  _ know, if he doesn’t understand something, you’ll straighten it out.”

I flattened my hand against his chest. “And you have a way of making him feel safe. He knows, and  _ I  _ know, that you’re going to protect him, physically and otherwise, no matter what. We’re a team. You, me, and now Brody.” He reached up to cup his hands around both sides of my jaw and pulled me down until my forehead rested on his. 

“You two are everything,” he nearly whispered, then he tilted his chin forward and fitted his lips against mine so that my bottom one nestled between his and he pulled, just the slightest bit, as he moved against me - soft and careful and probably very conscious of the fact that it was not the time to start anything, because it most certainly would go unfinished.

“You’re  _ still  _ kissing?” Brody’s voice, incredulous in the same way it had been when I informed him that he did, in fact, have to bathe  _ every  _ day (and not always under a mountain of bubbles and toys), cut through the moment and Chris pulled back and dropped his forehead to my shoulder, one hand falling onto the arm of the couch behind me and the other landing on my knee. I just bit my lip and studied my shoes to keep from laughing.

Chris turned his head so that his temple rested on my shoulder and he was looking at Brody. “Get used to it buddy. You’ve got a whole lifetime of this ahead of you.” And god, every single thing about that statement made me happier than I would have thought possible.

...

  
Two hours later, after 45 minutes spent officially finalizing the adoption in the courtroom (at the end of which, before signing off on the last form, the judge asked Brody if he was ready for Chris and me to be his mommy and daddy, and Brody shrugged and said, “Yeah. I mean, I thought they already were.”) and another 20 minutes taking pictures there with Marcus, Ms. Donovan, and even the judge, we pulled into Carly’s driveway. Chris was out of the car and opening Brody’s door before I’d even gathered up my purse and the Spiderman backpack we’d packed with Brody’s play clothes. Typically I’d give him a hard time about  _ ladies first  _ and  _ be a gentleman and help me out here  _ (not because I actually meant it, but because it was fun to watch him get all flustered before he realized I was joking, even after all that time), but there was no way in hell I was going to say or do anything that might dampen his excitement. I actually loved watching him sprint around the front of the car to get to Brody’s door before he could get free from his booster seat and out of the car on his own.

“Wanna ride, little possum?” Brody nodded emphatically at Chris’s question and stood in the car’s doorway waiting while Chris turned his back to him and lowered into a squat, standing again once Brody clung to his neck and had wrapped his legs around Chris’s ribs. I just watched from my spot by my own door, tickling Brody’s side when Chris came to stand next to me, beaming down at me. “Ready?”

" Ready.” I reached to loosen Chris’s tie a little and unbutton the very top button of his dress shirt, his suit jacket already discarded to the back seat, to ease some of the pressure that Brody’s grip on his shoulder seams must have been putting on his throat. He winked at me and I looped my arm around his waist below Brody's legs and butt.

We walked straight through the front door without knocking, not unusual for any time we came by (for Chris at least, it still wasn’t something I was comfortable with when I was on my own), but it would have been pointless that day anyway, as we already knew no one was in the house to hear it. We didn’t stop until we’d made it to the family room in the back of the house, standing in front of the French doors that looked out over the large back yard. 

B rody gasped and his voice was full of wonder. “Is it my birthday?”

Chris and I both laughed, but honestly, I couldn’t blame him for thinking that’s exactly what it looked like. Carly’s back yard was full of kids, her own, of course, and several from Brody’s kindergarten class, many of them the same ones who would be in his first grade class in just over a week. While the kids ran around like crazy, being typical kids (with Chris’s nephews seeing their ages as an opportunity to try to assert some authority over Brody’s classmates, trying to put together an organized game of  _ something _ , and his niece clucking like a little mother hen over one of the younger children’s even younger sister), the adults clustered in groups around the yard. There were the Evans women, all with the same perfectionist gene that drove Chris, tending to the snacks and drinks on the punch table under the banner hung between two trees - individual letter flags strung together to spell Brody’s full legal name,  _ Brody Christopher Vargas Evans _ \- then there was the small group of school parents chatting and watching their kids burn out energy, some of Chris’s old buddies and his dad clustered around Carly’s husband at the grill, and a few more old childhood friends gathered around Scott and, a surprise even to me, Spencer and Corey. I looked up at Chris, wide-eyed, when I saw them, and the way he was already watching me told me he had been waiting for me to spot them.  _ Surprise, baby _ , he mouthed, and I tightened my arm around his waist, pulling myself closer to him and turning to press my lips to his chest through his dress shirt. 

After finally soaking in the scene that I’d spent the last few weeks planning (with a lot of help) but hadn’t yet seen, I looked up at my son, his arms wrapped around his father’s neck and his cheek pressed to Chris’s, his eyes wide as he looked out onto the yard and wondered if he’d managed to miss his own birthday. “Kind of,” I answered him, shrugging. I hadn’t planned on framing it that way, even if it did look like a birthday party, but if that’s the way he wanted to look at it, that was okay too. “You’re so special you get celebrated twice, once for your regular birthday next month and now again for the day you officially became our little boy, your Gotcha Day.” I was ready for more questions about what that meant. That’s not exactly the question I got.

“Is there cake?” His eyes were almost as big as his grin.

My chin dropped to my chest for a second and I dropped Brody’s little backpack and smacked Chris’s stomach playfully with the hand not already wrapped around him, “Your son.” 

Chris laughed and pulled one hand from where it hooked behind Brody’s knee to hold it palm up for him to slap. “You know it.” He reached up and over his own shoulders with both hands then, hooking them under Brody’s arms and lifting him over his head, Brody’s knees pulled to his chest to make sure his feet cleared Chris’s head and shoulders, to lower him to the floor. He waited for Brody to turn to face him then dropped his hand to the top of his head. “Why don’t you go hug your Nana before she bursts, then go say hi to your cousins and your friends. Try not to destroy your clothes ‘cause we’re gonna take some more pictures, then you can change to play and have cake. Sound good?” Brody nodded and lunged forward to wrap his arms around Chris’s legs, holding himself there a second longer than a normal hug, then sidestepped to do the same to me. 

I was sure he didn’t fully understand all the legal ramifications of everything that had happened that day. But he knew  _ something  _ had happened. And I think, over the past four weeks, since Mallory had passed and we’d started the adoption process, that we’d managed to make him understand that what we wanted more than anything was to be able to love him, protect him, watch him grow and learn and just  _ be  _ for, well, forever. And while ‘forever’ was probably a little bit much to expect a six-year-old to understand, I believed that what he wanted, just as much, was for Chris and me to be his parents, for the three of us to be a family. So even if he still didn’t quite get what adoption was, and even if it wasn’t actually going to change anything about any of our day-to-day lives (because for as much as he’d gone through, and for as terrible as his first individual foster placement was, he hadn’t been bounced from one foster home to another, the way many kids in the foster system were, and he wouldn’t really see any concrete differences between what his life had been for the past six months and what it would be from that day forward), I still believed that he understood that things were just a little bit different. We’d loved him from the very beginning, so it’s not like he was going to suddenly feel love that he’d been missing, but as we’d walked out of the courthouse there was unmistakably a lightness among us, a sense of security and ease and wholeness that we hadn’t had before.

He pulled away and turned to go join everyone in the backyard, all there to celebrate him, but I called out, stopping him. “Hey Brody?”

He turned and grinned up at me, his head tilted a little to one side and his eyes curious. “Yeah Mommy?”

I smiled, “I love you.” My voice was playful, a hint of something left unsaid at the end of the sentence. 

His eyes lit up and he bounced on his toes, “More than all the stars in the sky!” His hands shot up over his head, drawing a wide arch as they came back to his sides. 

I bit my bottom lip and nodded, bringing my own hands up to rest over Chris’s where he’d stepped behind me and curled them over my shoulders. “More than  _ all  _ the stars in the sky,” we both echoed, a promise, a vow, really.

Brody just nodded once then turned on his heel and darted out the French doors, flinging them wide and leaving them open behind him. “Nana!” He sprinted across the yard, past all his friends and their parents, his cousins and aunts and (g)uncles, straight to his grandmother, already bent at the waist and ready to absorb the impact when he inevitably crashed into her.

“Oh, my boy!” She gathered him into her arms, hugging him tight and pressing kisses all over his face and head.

As the rest of the guests closed in around them, all eager to get their moment with the newest Evans, Chris slid his hands across my chest until both arms crossed over and around me, his hands closed loosely around his own biceps. “You good?” he asked, deep and quiet, right in my ear.

I nodded and hooked my hands over his, tucking my fingers into his palms when he rubbed his thumbs over my knuckles. “Yeah, can we just stand here for a minute? I kind of just want to watch, take it all in.”

“Of course, baby.” He held me just a little bit tighter and kissed my cheek right in front of my ear, lingering there as I turned my head and capturing my mouth with his as soon as I was in reach. After the kiss though, instead of pulling away, he murmured against my lips, “We’ve got all the time in the world.” 

And there it was again, that promise that  _ this _ \- Chris, Brody, the family and friends celebrating in the backyard, all of it - was forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Isn’t it kind of amazing, how a person who was once a stranger, can suddenly, without warning, mean the whole world to you?” ~ Anonymous

**Author's Note:**

> New chapters will be updated weekly (on Fridays).


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